You’ve probably seen a few blogs that display page addresses like this:

http://somesiteorother.com/?p=864

Now, these are nice and short and don’t get changed by microblogging services like twitter, but how much more informative is a link like the ones you see on Sciencetext?

http://www.sciencetext.com/make-firefox-load-faster.html

Now, every day users may not care, but search engines seem to. After all, who is ever going to be searching for searches “p=864″. Plenty of people will be searching for the phrase “make Firefox load faster”. Using keywords as the basis of your site’s links would apparently be fundamental SEO!

With a keyword-based web address, that ties in with the title of your post (which should have H1 tags) and the individual meta description for each post, will give you a much higher ranking in the search engines than a p=864 type web address.

One other aspect of this basic SEO, is that you should never, never, never have a title of any article whether it’s on the web or in print that is ten words long. Ten words is a strapline not a headline. The optimum length for a keyword-rich post title is 2-4 words people search for phrases of 2 or 3 words, so the fourth will cover the noise word in your title, the a, an, the etc. 3-4 is optimum for 99.9999% of anybody’s readership. Rarely a 1 title would suffice, but only if it’s something earth shattering, like a post about an imminent alien invasion, when the headline “Aliens” would be acceptable. More rarely, a 5-word title might be need if it’s a “how to” page or similar. But, really, never any more than that. It won’t help your ranking because the keywords will be diluted and it will look messy in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

To make your web addresses behave like mine automatically in WordPress, ie “pretty” vs “ugly” in WordPress parlance, go to your Dashboard –> Settings –> Permalinks –> Custom Structure

Enter the following in that box and save: /%postname%.html

The “.html” is optional, it makes no difference to SEO, SERPs, or WordPress, but looks more traditional to visitors who glance at the address bar. If the .htaccess control file in your WordPress folder is not writeable you will have to make it so using CHMOD (via FTP usually) or else edit the .htaccess file via your cPanel or in a plain-text editor and save to the server to add the code given by WordPress when you save the new permalinks setting. You can always revert to default if it gets messed up, and try again.

Having written this post, I then met a self-proclaimed SEO via twitter who was using ugly links. I was confused as to why they wouldn’t use the more search-engine friendly “pretty” format. Apparently their testing had shown that it made little difference to the ranking they got for their sites in the search engines.

Well, I beg to differ and cited a couple of items from my blogs that were ranked #1 for their title in the SERPs within minutes of posting, whereas post titles on the SEO’s ugly site were not ranking at all. Seems self-evident to me, if you want to get ahead make yourself pretty rather than ugly.