Wordpress permalinks are important for SEO. The default permalink format is meaningless and should be formatted correctly to improve SEO and help readers more easily navigate your blog.
Get rid of dates, use categories and post titles instead
The default wordpress permalink format is to use post numbers, which is the worst option you could use. It can be confusing and isn’t very descriptive to the reader or search engines. Some blogs use the date along with the title of the post, which is slightly better.
To change permalink settings go to ‘Permalinks’, under ‘Settings’ in the Wordpress admin to setup your custom format.
The best option is to select ‘custom structure’ and enter one or more of the following:
%category% – displays the category the post is filed under
%postname% – displays a hyphenated version of your post title
%author% – displays the author of the post
When entering the custom permalink format, you have to include the leading and trailing forward slashes. So to just show the postname in the url, enter: /%postname%/
Wordpress is installed to the root of my website, but I wanted the blog to appear to be in a subdirectory. So my permalink format is /blog/%category%/%postname%/.
If you have multiple people writing posts for a blog, you could also try out %author% to group all posts by that author together.
Use hyphens instead of underscores.
Wordpress is good and automatically uses hyphens out of the box. If you’re using any other blogging software, ensure that individual words in your urls are separated by hyphens and not underscores.
The reason for this is that Google treats words separated by underscores as one word, while it understands that words separated by hyphens are separate words.
The problem with that is if you have an url that contains grey_cat, the page will only be returned if the user searches for grey_cat. However, if your url is grey-cat, the page is returned if any of the following are searched for: grey, cat, grey cat or “grey cat”.
And of course, if you write a really informative, relevant page on grey cats, your url could be irrelevant but still rank really highly due to relevant page content.
Matt Cutts, a Google engineer has written a more in depth article about it (hyphens, not cats) here.
