WordPress Permalinks Optimal settings

Basic On-Page WordPress Search Engine Optimization always start with Search Engine Friendly URLs.

You can set these via the Option Permalinks in your WordPress administration Panel.
But be aware that for these setting to work, you need to be on an Apache Web server that has Mod_Rewrite active and working!

If you are on a widows based hosting package, there is no way to achieve SEF URLs, and you have to settle for the standard produced by WordPress.

The easy way

The easiest way the get a good working .htaccess file is this:

• Upload an empty file called htaccess.txt to the root of your WordPress installation directory.
• Set the permissions to 707 which means writable by system and public.
• Rename the file to .htaccess
• Go into your admin panel and choose your preferred URL setting.
• Save the settings and check if your get the URLs you want.

WordPress Permalink Options

There are several options standard in WordPress..
I don't like any of them :-)

Here is my preferred choice, the setting i like to use is the custom value
/%postname% .html

That means you get post URLs that incorporate the post titles and ends with .html

Be aware that this works with Posts only, page URLs are created with the title, without an extension.

So if you want the same URL for your posts as for your pages, you should set the option to /%postname

Now you have a URL like www.example.com/post-title and www.example.com/page-title

As for the new version ow WP 2.3 and up there are a lot less problems with the duplicate content problems you might have before, since they made it a lot better picking up the URLs for each of the posts.

Note! Pick your choice of premalinks and stick to it! Changing it after your indexed means doeing a lot of 301 redirects..