It seems that every one and their third cousin are using a long, dated string of WordPress permalink gunk to point to his or her blog posts.

You know the kind of link I mean, something like: http://www.myblog.com/2009/01/08/what-a-great-long-post-this-is-that-I-wrote-a-year-ago-you-should-read-it-anyway.

Kind of ridiculous, isn’t it? And it’s really not a good strategy if you’re truly trying SEO tactics to improve your site’s traffic.

Iknow there will be exceptions to this rule, but how often do you *really* want to add the date to your permalink? If the content is still relevant months or even years after posting, the date seems irrelevant.

And a person browsing could see that link pop up and never even make it past the date in looking at the link, 1) because it’s long past, or 2) because it’s just too damn long!

Fortunately, I have two strategies you can use to combat “dated posts” or permalinks that take are like a Shakespearean couplet all run together without the rhyming or good English usage.

Read on and learn how to fashion the best permalinks possible! (In most cases…)

1) First, in the admin section of your blog, go to Settings >> Permalinks. Here is where you decide on the settings for how your links will look.

The default is usually something non-helpful both SEO-wise and to your readers, like: http://simplewebguitar.com/?p=123 or the aforementioned http://simplewebguitar.com/2010/02/08/sample-post/.

Wordpress Default Permalink Settings

Fortunately, this is very simple to change. My recommendation is doing away entirely with the date and/or page number and simply sticking with the main words in your original post title as the permalink.

Here’s the setting I recommend:

Wordpress Permalink Settings I Recommend

Just remove the code before /%postname%/ on the last radio button example and select that.

NOW, your post will look much better by only including the title: http://www.myblog.com/a-great-post-on-SEO-permalinks

2) The second thing you can do is download and install the SEO Slug plugin which will strip out words like “the” and “on” and all other extraneous words until you’re left with just the juicy SEO title.

In this example, the original post title was “When There Is Love It Always Pays The Rent”:

Shortened SEO Post Title

This new post title is much more search-engine friendly and also looks a lot better on the eyes. I believe the latest version of the WordPress plugin All-In-One SEO will also strip out the extra post words, but I’m not absolutely sure. The pro version of this plugin is also going for $39 – $69 these days.

A lot of plugin developers are moving away from basically giving plugins away to a paid model. Another example of this is the excellent Ajax Edit Comments plugin. Check that plugin out for some welcome additional functionality in your comments section.

You can thank me later 8^)

Questions? Comments, ajaxed or not? Love to hear from you below!