WordPress Permalink Post Names for SEO

In my post “themastersfamily.net – Page Rank 4” – I mentioned that I had changed the permalink structure for SEO purposes to the following –

websitename.com/postname-postid.htm

I did this based on the theory that Google puts more emphasis of pages from the root of the site then a page in a sub-folder like this –

websitename.com/category/postname/

Well another thing that I know, but had not put 2 and 2 together on, was that although I had this structure and was putting keywords in the title so that page would be named with the keywords, the website names that I was referring to where getting smashed together and where unreadable to search engines.

Here is an example of how domain names would be generated on this site before my change –

idano.net/roundrockwebdesigncom-16.htm

As you can see it would remove the .com and run it into the back of the domain. So I started to change the post slug* name to be this –

idano.net/roundrockwebdesign-dot-com-16.htm

This seemed to do the job when all of a sudden it dawned on me – why not put a dash between all of my key words in the domain name so that Google can pick up on them individually?

Thus I changed the slug to –

idano.net/round-rock-web-design-dot-com-16.htm

With this change Google can and will pick up on the individual words and index them accordingly.

What this did was take a meaning less phrase of roundrockwebdesign and turn it into for individual words of round, rock, web, and design.

For reference here is an article that supports “The Dash Theory”

Finally this is what I have entered in WordPress for my permalink format –

/%postname%-%post_id%.htm

* The Post Slug in the right hand column when writing or managing your post.

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