What is the best Permalink structure to use in WordPress?

There are probably quite a few different opinions in regards to the best permalink structure to use and some structures are going to be better from an SEO perspective than others.

The worst permalink structure to use is the default one. The default is yourdomain.com?p=#, where the # is the id number of the post. If you change nothing else in your WordPress configuration, you should change the permalink structure to something other than the default. This is because the URL that is generated for each post tells the search engine nothing about the content of the post. and a URL of mydomain.com?p=123 doesn’t contribute anything to informing the search engines about the content of your post.

On some hosts, the default is the only permalink structure that will work. This is because they don’t recognize the .htaccess file that WordPress uses to tell the web server how to map a different permalink structure to the post id. If your host does not support .htaccess files, and you have any interest at all in SEO — then you should look into changing hosts.

Personally, I use %category%/%postname%/. This is because I want the category of the post to be included in the URL of the post, which is one way of letting the search engines know that the category is important. I also have very few categories and they’re pretty narrowly focused. If you use a lot of different categories, this technique may not be as beneficial to you.

Some people like to include the date in the permalink, using something like %year%/%day%/%postname%/. While this isn’t bad, the search engines don’t really get anything out of it. Google doesn’t realize that the year is a year — it just looks like a number.

I’ve also seen comments that Google will rank a page better if the extension of the filename portion of the URL is .html, so they recommend using a permalink like %postname%.html. I don’t believe that a page ranks better with one extension over another. The search engines will take the entire URL and find keywords within it. So a URL of “top-10-best-web-hosts” vs. “top-10-best-web-hosts.html” will be almost the same, but the “html” is also included as a keyword in the second URL. Is the word “html” important when discussing the top 10 best web hosts? Probably not, so why include it in the URL? Does Google throw away the “html” portion of the URL? I don’t know. But there are lots of sites on the ‘net that have extensions like .php, .asp, .aspx, .pl or .cf and others and their content gets indexed by the search engines just fine. My conclusion is that the extension doesn’t add anything.

One of the reasons I like WordPress so much is it’s flexibility. And being able to change how a post’s URL will appear ranks very high as far as how the search engines look at the content of your site. So being able to change it to suit your purposes is just as important.

If you’re now convinced that you should change your permalink structure, what are the options? Here’s a list of the tokens that you can use in the permalink setting, as references from the WordPress Codex:

• %year%
  The year of the post, four digits, for example 2010.
• %monthnum%
  Month of the year, two digits, for example 05.
• %day%
  Day of the month, two digits, for example 28.
• %hour%
  Hour of the day that the post was written, two digits, for example 15.
• %minute%
  Minute of the hour that the post was written, two digits, for example 43.
• %second%
  Second of the minute that the post was written, two digits, for example 33.
• %postname% – best!
  A sanitized version of the title of the post (post slug field on Edit Post/Page panel).
• %post_id%
  The unique ID number of the post, for example 423.
• %category% – better
  A sanitized version of the category name (category slug field on New/Edit Category panel).
• %author% – good
  A sanitized version of the author name.

Which tags are the best to use? As mentioned before, all of the words that appear in the URL are used by the search engines to get an idea of the type of content for the page. So using tokens that help to describe the content is always best. The %day%, %hour%, %seconds%, %post_id%, etc. are just numbers and add little value. The %author% token on the other hand will add keywords, but remember how the search engines use these keywords. If the author name is important in categorizing the contents of the post then you can consider using it. But if it doesn’t add value you may be better off using something else.

Using something in addition to the %postname% token could be important if you also want to avoid collisions between your posts and pages. This may be another good argument for using the date as part of the permalink, as you’ll never have a collision between post and page names. But using any token at all will avoid the chance of a collision, so I always recommend to use another token that will add keywords, rather than one that will just add a number.

One final thing to note is the situation where you have more than one post with the same name. In these instances, WordPress will automatically change the permalink to avoid collisions. This is one reason why some people like using the date as part of the permalink. It is far less likely that you will have name collisions within the same month than over the entire life of your blog.

Exactly which permalink structure and combination of tokens will work best for you depends entirely on what you’re doing. As long as you’re using at least the %postname% token, you should be fine. The other tokens will help in narrowing the focus for your posts if that’s important to you.