From the recent WordCamp Philippines 2008, I preferred attending the Wordpress & SEO lecture by Hans Koch. He pointed out good notes to write down about some of the best seo-related plugins, and other aspects of seo that you can work with wordpress but he did miss something, that is working with the permalink structure.

I have checked a number blogs earlier and found out that most of them don’t care of the permalinks issue. If you’ll notice, wordpress permalink by default shows a question mark and numbers in it, obviously not search engine friendly. You can customize this by going to Dashboard > Settings > Permalinks section of your wordpress powered blog. You’ll see five options there for your permalink:

• Default - http://www.kontrapelo.com/?p=123
• Day and name - http://www.kontrapelo.com/2008/09/12/sample-post/
• Month and name - http://www.kontrapelo.com/2008/09/sample-post/
• Numeric - http://www.kontrapelo.com/archives/123
• Custom Structure - you can create your own here

Of all the choices, I usually prefer making it custom that don’t include the postdate. Why? Well, here’s the idea:

url #1: kontrapelo.com/2008/09/12/wordpress-seo
url #2: kontrapelo.com/wordpress-seo

The first url above tells Google that “2008/09/12″ is more important than “wordpress-seo” as it is placed first. Placing the “date” first before your “name” structure pushes your keywords away. This is the best permalink structure for me but if you’re working a way to have your article featured in Google news which requires a 3-digit included in your url, it’s a no-no. If your wordpress blog already has 100 posts prior to targetting appearance in Google news, then something like “name/id” will do. If the blog is new, then work your way to have a 3-digit number in it. You can play around with the “year/month/date” placing it after the “name” structure.

In addition, I’ve read an article before (can’t remember where) saying Matt Cutts mentioned in WordCamp 2007 in San Francisco that the best permalink structure you can use is just the post title with hyphens.