If you run a WordPress blog that relies on search engine traffic, it is important to put a little time and effort into improving the Search Engine Optimization of your blog. If you care about the optimization of your site, Jim Westergren has provided a well written Complete Guide to SEO for WordPress.

Unfortunately I’m not familiar with Jim’s creditability as an SEO expert, but the article is well written and he provides justification for most of the points he brings up. One of the things he has covered is the permalink structure, which has been talked about a bit on this site over the past few weeks. Here is what Jim has to say:

To enable the permalinks is easy and you have probably already done that, just go to Options -> Permalinks in the admin panel. But what format is the best to choose? The structure /%postname%/ – nothing else. This is best because your URLs to your articles should never change. And if you have it like this it does not matter if you change the category of the article or republish it with a new date, it will always be the same URL (more about that later). And if you happen to have two posts with the same title it is not a problem as WordPress will automatically add -2 in the end.

Have you been using the wrong format? Well, if your blog is not totally new you should not change. It is not vital and for the next time you make a blog you know how to make it right.

If your blog is still young and you’d like to make the switch, I explained how to easily do this with a 301 redirect to ensure you don’t have any broken links. Otherwise, Jim recommends to stay with your current setup.

To see additional SEO tips, I recommend checking out Jim’s post and even bookmarking it for future reference!