I’ve read several different viewpoints on what to select for WordPress Permalink settings and I’ve finally decided to create this post to keep my favorites at hand.
One thing to keep in mind if the site is going to have a lot of traffic and therefore, a lot of posts and comments, is you probably want to include enough of a date in your URL so as to not invite the possibility of conflicting URLs.
If dating the posts seems counter-productive to your goals, below is a simple solution:
/%postname%-%post_id%
The URL comes out like this: /my-new-post-2.html
You may also add the category slug by using the %category% option.
/%category%/%postname%-%post_id%
The URL comes out like this: /news/this-is-a-new-post-2.html
This makes the most sense to me, as the category should be a valuable keyword, followed by the valuable keywords in the post itself – and the ID number ensures that it’ll be unique, which is good for SEO. It’s also good if you want your posts to appear in Google News, although other factors are involved.
