The video shows it in use. I apologize for the terrible audio that goes in and out of sync and has a lot of noise – I did this on my slow old laptop with the mike built into my cheapo headset. The video is a bit disorganized, but hopefully it’s enough to show you the power of wp_pear-debug. See below the video for some useful links.

The common methods available in php_debug are listed here:
http://www.php-debug.com/www/docs/V2.0.0/PHP_Debug/Debug.html

That page is surprisingly hard to find from the php_debug home page, so make a note of it.

Plugin Home Page
http://www.communitymodder.com/Released-wordpress-plugins/wp-pear-debug-wordpress-plugin.html – nice description, screenshots, and help on how to install and use the plugin.

The official WordPress.org Plugin download page

In the video, I call the dump() method using the direct invocation:
wp_pear_debug::dump($defaults, ‘Defaults1′);

Since I’m not doing much, this was simpler than creating a new object and invoking it as

$debugObject = wp_pear_debug::get();
$debugObject->dump($default);

SEO

• Headspace2 — an SEO Swiss Army Knife. This lets you control titles, control what gets indexed and what doesn’t, create meta descriptions (which are used in the Google results if there is not a matching keyword phrase on your page), integrate analytics packages, use distinct page titles (in the title tag) and post title (in the H1 tag), and much, much more.
• Redirection — Another John Godley plugin like Headspace2. This lets you redirect links, which is useful for at least two situations: 1) you can redirect for pages with obsolete URLs not already handled by WordPress and 2) you can send links to an address like http://yoursite.com/outbound/outgoing—link which allows you to track outbound links and their statistics. If the outbound link may change often, you can redirect to a standard location and just change the URL in one spot.
• Google XML sitemaps — for some reason, the Headspace2 plugin wasn’t working for a while on some sites, so I used this.
• Excerpt Editor — just discovered this one — killer plugin for bulk editing Excerpts on legacy site. The name Excerpt is misleading. In point of fact, what we want is summaries or teasers that give the user a sense of what the article is about, rather than an excerpt (usually the first bit of the post) that may or may not describe the actual content. So this makes the category pages and front page a lot more scannable for the user. Furthermore, since the "excerpts" are not excerpts at all, but unique content, this will help with duplicate content issues (which is why I put it under SEO, though it could just as easily be considered a usability plugin). Anyway, this makes it super easy. I needed to create 25 excerpts quickly on a site the other day and this made it super easy (not so easy that I’ve done it on this blog, but I’m raised by turtles, so things take time).

Interface Customization

• Widget Logic — show/hide widgets for certain categories, pages, users, tags. For example, let’s say you have a text widget that says "Sign up for our newsletter," you might not want this on your newsletter signup page. This lets you show and hide widgets on specific pages and posts, as well as categories pages.
• WP Greet Box — Based on an idea made famous by Seth Godin, which suggest showing some special content only to new users (users with no cookie for your site). So if Greet Box thinks the user has never been to the site before, you could show a header above the post that says "check out these other popular posts" or something like that to orient new users to your site.
• WP Post Admin Column Filter — filters the post admin screen so that it only shows columns you want — no website as I just wrote the pre-alpha version. Very simple and currently hard-coded column selection only.
• Exclude Pages — lets you keep specific pages out of Page widgets/menus. For example, I might want to have a Terms and Conditions page, but I typically wouldn’t want that to show up in my Recent Pages or my main menu. This lets me exclude those.

Spam Protection

• Hashcash — block most spam without making users deal with a CAPTCHA. This can also be used in conjunction with a CAPTCHA or with Akismet (which should be on every WordPress site).

Ad Management

• Ad Injection — inject ad code or any code into posts. A lot of the really major media sites like to put ads in the middle of an article so that the reader has to read over it. This does it automatically for small-timers like us and it could be used for many things besides ads, such as a random image to dress up posts, or whatever.
• Ad rotation — This lets you put a set of ads into rotation for various spots on your site and manage them through a central interface. This is good if you want something simpler than OpenX or Doubleclick for Publishers.

Image Display

• Lightbox Plus — A lightbox, that is a plugin that displays images in a floating layer above the page, without leaving the page. It’s what I’m using on this site.
• Floatbox Plus — a paid lightbox, but very nice. We’re using this on the photo gallery on the site of our Yosemite Vacation Rental.

Debug

• wp pear_debug — sort of like the Drupal devel module. A bit hard to explain and I hope to do a video of this one, but let’s say you need to capture some information about what’s happening inside a plugin. If you have it output all kinds of debug info, that messes up the look and may itself cause things to crash. This lets everything run normally, but outputs the dumped data nicely formatte.
• Debug Bar — this gives you all kinds of information about the setup and system. Not nearly as handy as wp_pear_debug, but still handy.

Contact Forms

• cForms II — Awesome contact form plugin that allows you to build complex forms and require specific information. Very good if you’re capturing leads, taking reservation requests, that sort of thing. We use this to create a reservation request form for our vacation rental in Yosemite. Super handy and it has worked really well for us.
• Contact form from Joost de Valk — simple and it’s by Joost, which means it’s done right. If you don’t need all the bells and whistles of cForms II, this is a good option.
• Secure and Accessible Contact Form — an old workhorse. This is still in use on this site and most other places and never have had a problem.

Geek

• Syntax highlighting evolved — if you post code on your blog, this will give you great syntax highlighting. You can see it in action on this site on my pages on adding noindex and nofollow tags to Drupal category pages and my page on adding custom form labels on Drupal forms (useful if the client just dislikes the standard labels or if you want different labels on the public and admin sides).

Third—Party Integration

• Twitter — display tweets on your site… Since I never actually tweet, I can say this seems to work fine, but it doens’t exactly get a tough workout from me

Automated Backup and Maintainence

• Back up your files — uploads and your custom stuff. Essentially a backup of your wp—content folder (minus base themes I think).
• Database backups emailed to you or just archived.

One of the killer tools is Deploy, which lets you build a site, then put in the FTP and database info for your live site and simply hit a button and push your dev site out to the live site. When coupled with the Drupal Deployment module it’s amazing (post on that coming one of these days).

WordPress, though has a nasty habit of making all the links absolute and then using the General Settings to set site root. The problem is that you have to set this to http://devsite.com for development and then when you deploy to the live site, it will die because it needs to be http://devsite.com

There’s a simply solution though. You can set the URL in your wp_config.php file to use as site root whatever it’s hosted on by simply adding these lines

define(‘WP_SITEURL’, ‘http://’.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);
define(‘WP_HOME’, ‘http://’.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']);

That’s it. Now you can deploy and it will just run, out of the box.

So now I ask you, “What else should I look at besides the awesome look of KillerThemeCSS?” Here are some things I’ve already looked at. Please add to them or correct my foolishness if I’m just plain looking at something the wrong way.

These are in the order the popped into my head, not necessarily in order of importance (and to some extent the importance will be determined by the degree to which they fail any of these tests).

Content code near the top

Do I really have to look at the code? I hope not. I’m a little worried, because I don’t really know HTML but even so, when I opened it up with View Source, the source was 10 screenfuls long and the main headline for the page was on the ninth screen. Is that a problem?

(Okay, this is not as big a problem as it used to be because the search engines have gotten better at figuring out what’s unique and what’s just repeated “service” content like navigational links and disclaimers and such. Look at the source code for a Google results page and you’ll see they certainly aren’t worrying as much about clean code either. But it’s still better not to confuse Google too much).

Proper use of H1 and H2

So someone told me it’s good to put my page headline in an H1 tag. But when I was looking at the source in the last step, I couldn’t find one? Is that a problem?

(This is unbelievably common and this post was actually prompted because I just looked at a “premium” paid theme that had no h1 or h2 on the front page and no h1 on the content pages).

What’s “above the fold” mean?

I love that stunning header image. It’s crisp, it’s clean, it looks professional and really catches the eye. And it had better catch the eye, because for users who don’t have the mega big monitor that the designer has, that’s all they’ll see because it takes up most of the screen. Is that bad?

(I’m exaggerating a bit, but there seems to be an increasing vogue for themes with such big headers that there’s hardly any content at all above the fold, that is, hardly any meaningful content visible to a user on an average monitor without scrolling).

Color and Contrast

My new theme with grey type on a black background looks awesome dude. Cool. Suave. Perfect for my edgy new music site. Except that nobody on a Mac can read it because their different gamma settings make it more like black on black. Is that a problem? And I really love the emphatic RED TYPE in the green sidebar. Many of my visitors are red-green color blind, so the only way they can see it is by doing “select all”. Is that a problem? I tried this just for kicks. I took a screenshot and loaded it into Photoshop (or was it Irfanview?).
– Converted it to greyscale. I couldn’t read a thing, but nobody has a black and white monitor, so this isn’t a problem right?
– Then I played with the contrast, brightness and gamma (in “levels” on Photoshop; under “Enhance colors” in Irfanview). When I got the gamma up to 1.30 or down to .70 I couldn’t tell my form buttons from the background, but nobody’s monitor is that far different from mine is it?

Font size

I love that font they use and how efficient it is at really packing information onto the page, though it is a bit of a hassle trying to read and hold a magnifying glass at the same time. So I hit CTRL-+ on Firefox and… and… it doesn’t resize. That should be okay though, right because everyone has the same screen resolution as I do and my target audience is all under 40, so they all have good eyes. That’s a safe assumption, right?

All screens wide and small

Hey, it’s a fluid design. That’s awesome! I heard that was the best way to go. It uses all my screen real estate and looks great at 800px and at 1024px. It’s a little hard to read at 1200px because the lines are sort of long. But nobody really opens their browser full screen at 1200px do they? And all those visitors in my logs with 1680px widescreen monitor have their browsers open at a reasonable size, right? They won’t get headaches and lose their place because my lines are 250 characters long, will they? And I don’t worry about those iPhone users because I checked my logs and they only visit one page and leave anyway, so I don’t really need to be concerned with them do I?

(Fluid is okay, but it can’t just let the content area expand up to any line length until it becomes unreadable. It can allow longer line lengths in terms pixels when it has bigger text — so if you’re going for variable line lengths, better to use ems, not pixels. It can allow wider display by rearranging elements at certain break points and intelligently using the screen — that’s the more sophisticated and more rare Switchy McLayout approach.

But with the growing prevalence of widescreens, an infinitely expandable center content area at a small font size is not good. At the same time, the mobile market has increased a lot too [candid admission: and I ignore it completely]. More and more there’s no such thing as a standard screen size and a higher and higher percentage of viewers will have very large (1600px+ wide) or very small (400px or less wide) screens. At least try one of the extremes depending on what your target audience is likely to be. The truth is, I don’t build to be mobile-friendly, but I’m seeing that the time has come, perhaps past, when you can get away with this without taking a hit).

Do Javascript and Flash degrade gracefully?

So I love how this theme has AJAX this and that and sIFR headlines that looks so crisp since standard HTML+CSS doesn’t give you anti-aliased fonts. Awesome. But when I looked at it while running the Firefox NoScript plugin, which blocks Flash and Javascript, well, the headlines were completely messed up and the navigation didn’t work and I can’t make comments or anything. Do people really surf without Flash and Jacascript? Is this something I should worry about?

(You used to have to count on losing 10% of your audience if your site required Javascript. Now so many popular sites are enhanced by Javascript, that the numbers of those opting out are dropping some, but there will always be some security conscious visitors who will opt out. Best practice is to opt for a progressive enhancement model, where the site works without Javascript, but it adds a lot of useful features if available.).

Is there a separate CSS file or section of a file for MY styles?

The theme has a hodge-podge of CSS files and I can’t figure out where I need to go to change anything. Is that a problem?

(Maybe or maybe not, depending on your skill and your needs. Some themes are made to be customized and some are not. I like themes that by default include an extra CSS file. Yep, that’s one more file to download, but you might be able to get around that once you go live (Drupal allows you to combine all the files once the development phase is over and cache it as a single, albeit hugely bloated, CSS file) and modern browsers allow more concurrent connections so in the future you may be better off with more small files rather than one big one anyway, even without taking browser caching into account. Once you have it tweaked in your prototype, you can always put it into one small, light CSS file to bring bandwidth down.

The advantage of this system, is that you can make any changes you want to that last file, the one with just your CSS rules, and override the distribution files. Then if the developers find that the theme itself has cross-browser or even security problems, you can move up to the next version of the theme without losing your changes. Also, new versions of the CMS may require new versions of the theme and by compartmentalizing your changes, the upgrade process will be simpler. Even if you do combine files in the end, you’ll have that file with the core changes you made to get your original look, so you can fall back on that if you upgrade.)

Validation

I just ran my site through the W3C HTML validator and got 132 errors. Is that a problem?

(Maybe. It can be hard to find a CMS and theme that actually passes HTML and CSS validation. There are a lot of reasons for this, but one is that modules often generate code and there is generally not a system for a module to find out what the theme DOCTYPE is. So if the theme is XHTML and the module expects HTML and throws out an tag without closing it ( or ) then it won’t validate. Also, since it’s hard to force users to input valid HTML, most CMSes stipulate a transitional DOCTYPE, not strict. Finally, a single affiliate banner from Commission Junction can trigger tons of errors and that’s the fault of nobody but the affiliate network.

I won’t get into the strict/transitional, html/xhtml debate here, but it is reasonable to expect that a theme, running stripped down with only core modules/plugins and validated content, should conform to whatever DOCTYPE the theme author specifies. Ideally, it should validate to the strict version of that DOCTYPE under that situation, though I might want to actually run it as transitional because of the issues with user-generated content. That said, those who tell you validation matters for ranking in Google are blowing smoke. The vast majority of websites don’t validate and so Google does not take validation into account per se, but only secondary effects, like truly broken code that it can’t parse out in order to figure out what the point of your page is and where the links go. It has to be really broken for that.)

Whoa! My Head’s Spinning. Can’t I Hire Someone?

Okay, confession time. I was possessed by an evil demon who channeled through my fingers and I have pretty much no clue what half of that stuff I typed up there means. What I really need is for someone who can just make those changes for me if they’re necessary.

I think I’m only going to use themes designed by freelance designers who are actually out there for hire and looking for work, because as it turns out, most of the hobbyists who design themes are too damn busy with the rest of their lives to even answer my emails and wouldn’t consider working for hire because they care more about spending time with their kids than the $150 I’m willing to give them.

Looking forward to you advice. PS My boss needs our site up and running tomorrow.

• Matt Cutts, the head of search quality at Google, has a nice overview on how to make the most of WordPress.
• Tubetorial series on WordPress SEO.

This means that you effectively have duplicate content, that is identical content that appears on multiple URLs. In a bad case, this will get some semi-random URL listed in the search engine instead of the one canonical (that is “authoritative, recognized, accepted”) URL that you want the search engines to use to get to that specific page on your site. It might also list both your preferred canonical URL and one or more of the others. That sounds good, because you could just take over the Google listings with your ten different URLs for your page of elephant jokes, but the problem is that it will split the power of those pages (call this Page Rank if you want). This might be even worse than listing the wrong page, because rather than one page in the top-10 in Google, you’ll have a page back at number 50 and another back at number 75 and so on. Nobody reads those pages. Why? Because you’ve ended up dividing up your inbound links and confusing the search engine robot. It’s just a robot—don’t make it think too hard!

For example, let’s say you just wrote a post on The Big Bad List of Elephant Jokes and you assign it a post slug of “elephant-jokes” and you put it in the categories “elephants” and “jokes” and you tag it as “humor”. You write it in June of 2020. This means that Goohoo! finds it at

• http://raisedbyturtles.org/ (b/c it shows up on the home page as the most recent post)
• http://raisedbyturtles.org/category/elephants (b/c it’s the most recent post in that category)
• http://raisedbyturtles.org/category/jokes (ditto)
• http://raisedbyturtles.org/tag/funny (ditto)
• http://raisedbyturtles.org/archives/2020/06/ (because it’s at the top of your June 2020 archives)
• http://raisedbyturtles.org/elephant-jokes (because this is the actual URL).

You don’t really want to do this. You want one canonical URL that reaches any given chunk of content. It’s better for you, your visitors and the search engines. So basically, you want to only index the “real”, that is canonical, URL.

Sorting the Canonical URL and Duplicate Content Issues

How do you do that? You could disallow the search engines from your archive and category pages using a robots.txt file. This will work, but the problem is that if you don’t get crawled before a post gets pushed off your home page, you might never get that post indexed (unless you generate a sitemap perhaps).

So what do you do? Simple, you install the incredible Headspace2 plugin. I used to use and recommend a hacked combination of the SEO Title Tag plugin and the All-in-one SEO Pack. That’s a powerful combo too, but not as powerful as Headspace2 and they need a minor hack (actually just a manual database change) to work together. I don’t say Headspace2 is incredible lightly, but this is just a great idea that is well-executed.

I got a fatal error when I installed H2, version 3.3.16, but that’s because the headpsace/plugins.php file needed to be executable by “owner” and I had the wrong file permissions on it. You can change that simply from your FTP client (try Filezilla if you don’t have an FTP client). If you’ve been using AIOSP, by the way, you can import all your data via the Headspace2 options.

Once you install this plugin (installs like any WP plugin; instructions in the readme file that comes with the download), you need to go in and enable some modules. This is a complex and powerful plugin and not all of it is enabled by default.

• From your WordPress admin area, go to Options » Headspace2 » Modules
• Look over at the “Disabled” list. Drag and drop any of these modules into the “Simple” section. I have the following activated currently:
  • No Index/No Follow — essential for sorting the duplicate content issue
  • Page Title — essential for the second part of this how-to.
  • Page Description — Let’s you create a custom meta description, which will get to in a second.
  • More Text — Instead of a generic “Read more” for a continued article, you can customize the text so it’s something like “Read more about sorting out duplicate content…”
  • Tags — lets you tag your pages and puts these tags in your meta keywords.
• Now that you have the modules enabled, you’ll be able to control the indexing of all your pages. At edit or creation time, you can keep a single page out of the search indexes, which is useful for things like Contact pages and things like that. More importantly, though, we’ll get rid of all those category and archive pages and make them more or less invisible to the search engines.
  • Go back to the Headspace2 “Page Settings”. You should see a list that includes:
    • Archives
    • Categories
    • Search Pages
    • Tag Pages
  • For each of those listed above (not all the ones listed by Headspace2), click on it and, at the bottom of the options, you can see two check boxes. Check the No Index box, but not the No Follow box. Save. This tells the search engine (Google, Yahoo, etc) that it shouldn’t even bother to keep a record of the content of that page, but that it should follow those links on through to the actual pages you want indexed. If you check the No Follow box, you would prevent the search engine from even finding those pages that you really want indexed.
  • Note that you can also edit the page title and other information for those pages. We won’t bother right now, but it’s something to keep in mind in case you want to customize any of this.

Sorting out Meta Titles

H2 has another great utility: it lets you set unique meta titles (that’s the one that appears in the upper browser title bar, not the one the reader sees on the page) that are different from your H1 heading title. You can also craft meta descriptions and meta keywords and, in fact, any meta information. It will add additional text entry boxes that let you set your keywords, description and title on the post edit/creation screen.

The meta title is really key and the only one that really really really matters. This is what appears in the big bold text in the search results. This is the first thing about your page that most people will see. You want to make it count and you don’t want to simply duplicate what you have for the post heading. Above all, under no circumstances should the average blogger have a site where the meta title looks like this: My Site Name | Name of My Post. Nobody cares about the name of your stupid site and it’s also not descriptive in the least if you have a name like mine. It makes your titles look less unique and harder to tell apart if your visitor has several pages of your site open in different browser tabs or windows.

Why would you want your meta title to be different from your post title? Well, Google’s top search quality engineer, Matt Cutts, pointed out in his WordPress SEO video that varying these two gives you two chances to match terms. You can use subtly different wording, looking to use alternate spelling (changes and changing in Matt’s example) or related terms (photos and pictures and images for example).

This is actually not why I do it, though.The meta title appears in the search results, so it needs to give the user some information scent. There’s only so much room to be clever. However, in your RSS feed or on page, where you’ve already got the users there, you might want to just give them something funny or clever, but perhaps that does not make the general idea of the article immediately obvious. In many cases, such as a how-to article like this, my two titles might be similar. But when I write some humor or political commentary, I might want to have an H1 heading that is engaging, but not necessarily descriptive in the same way the meta title is.

Meta Title

Longer, more descriptive title that should say: “I answer your question. I am the page that you’re looking for. Come look at me.”

H1 Heading Title

Might be even longer (on this page I’ve added the “WordPress Setup Part 2″) or very short. It might be pithy, ironic or a mystery whose real meaning is only revealed as the reader goes down the page. The user is on the page already and has a view of the text that follows. The H1 text should say “Read on! I’m funny. I’m interesting. I’m good for a laugh or a solution.” It’s not necessarily a summary.

What if I already have pages without unique titles?

So now if you’ve never written a post and you don’t want to set titles for categories, you’re all set, but what if you are trying to fix up an old site, or you want to attach titles to category pages? Simple. Just leave the Options panel and head on over to Manage » Meta-data. You’ll see that H2 gives you a list with the Post Title (what appears on the page) fixed and the Page Title (what appears in the browser bar) editable. Now, look at the upper right corner of the screen. Headspace lets you mass edit almost everything—page title, post-slug, custom “more” text and everything. This is an amazing management tool.

Other Meta Tags

Meta Keywords

Who cares about these? The search enignes don’t pay attention anymore, so it’s just a waste of bandwidth, right? Perhaps, but things change and you may someday find these useful for your own internal search algorithms or what have you. I do this for my benefit, not the search engines. I write my title first, which keeps me on topic. I write keywords last, to see how I did. But of course you can ignore it. Since you’re using Headspace, you just generate your tags, which have uses for helping your visitors find related posts and so forth, and these will become meta keywords, so why not (if it’s not worth being a tag, I don’t bother to add extras).

Meta Description

Search engines don’t use this either, right? Probably not for ranking (how high you are in the results), but they might use it for relevance (trying to figure out the actual content of your post, assuming the description matches the rest of the page). More importantly, the will use it for the snippet that appears in the search results in some cases. An example would be where the algorithm tells the engine that your page is on elephant jokes, but it doesn’t find the word on the page so it can’t find a relevant snippet. What does it use? If you have no meta description, it might use nothing or it might just start grabbing your navigation text (I’ve had that happen on image pages). If you have the description, you control what appears in these cases instead of depending on SE magic.

Recap

By using Headspace2, you save yourself tons of headaches, lots of theme-hacking, and make your site more usable for visitors and search engines alike. If done right, your duplicate content issues and duplicate title issues will be totally resolved.

The Problem with the default WordPress URLs

By default, every page in WordPress will have a URL like http://site.com/?pid=31. What you want is a URL like http://raisedbyturtles.org/elephant-jokes for your collection of Elephant Jokes because of course there is nothing funnier than elephant jokes and nobody who sees that URL will be able to resist the urge to click it. Nobody. Some WordPress user add additional parameters (and I did so in the past), so that it looks like http://site.com/2020/06/07/elephant-jokes if it’s posted on June 7, 2020 (I predict a resurgence in the popularity of elephant jokes in the 2020s). That’s fine, but there is a drawback in that you probably don’t want people navigating back up to http://site.com/2020/06 by editing your URL because that URL may be a dead end or, at best, list the articles published on that date. So Google’s top “search quality” engineer, Matt Cutts, suggests simply using the post name. If you will have a carefully categorized, hierarchical site, where posts will typically belong to just one category, it may make sense to have the category in the URL (again, more information for your visitors and in your search results). Otherwise, probably not.

Why Change Your URL Schema?

Some people call these type of URLs “search-engine friendly” but in reality, the search engines can handle a URL in the default form just fine. However, this method lets you achieve a few things:

• You give keywords and context to the search engines (SEs). This isn’t going to automatically rocket you to the top, but it will help the SEs a lot in determining what the main point of the page is. I’m not smart enough to game the search engines and I also believe that long-term, it will just become harder and harder anyway. That said, like any writing, you don’t want to make it purposely difficult for the reader. So you use this to give one of your “readers”, aka Googlebot or the Yahoo! Slurp or the MSN engine, a little help in understanding your message.
• You give keywords and context to your users. I often look at a URL before I click on a link. I use this information all the time and appreciate a well-chosen URL, whether displayed at the bottom of my browser or in search results. However, where this really helps your potiential audience is in the case where someone does something like paste a URL into an email or forum. Which of the following is more useful to you as a reader:
  • “Hey Bill, I thought you might appreciate this – http://example.com/?p=34″
  • “Hey Bill, I thought you might appreciate this – http://raisedbyturtles.org/elephant-jokes“

  Definitely the second one. It saves you time—if you don’t want to read elephant jokes (and why would you so hate elephants?), you don’t waste your time clicking.

• Easier to remember and to give out verbally.

How do your Change Your Default URL Schema in WordPress?

This is very simple. In your WP admin area, go to Options » Permalinks and choose Custom. Now for your custom structure, you can enter in the text box:

• /%postname%/ — This is the Matt Cutts style.
• /%category%/%postname%/ — This is my preferred style for a site that is meaningfully hierarchical and categorized (i.e. if you expect people to use drill-down navigation).
• /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/ — use this if you really don’t want any duplicate paths, but realistically all you need to do is add a number at the end of the post slug and you’ll get the same effect.

By default, WordPress will just use your-very-long-post-title-with-little-words-included. Sometimes that’s okay, depending on the title, but as a general rule, write custom post-slug on every post. The other important thing to remember here is to write a custom post-slug on every post. In the post edit/creation area, there’s a box on the right called post-slug that determines the last element of your URL. By the way, if you don’t already, write a custom post-slug on every post. Did I mention that already?

Recap

WordPress gives you a nice facility for creating intelligent and readable URLs for your site. Taking a bit of time to restructure the default URL and to write useful post-slugs on every post will be beneficial to your readers, will attract more readers and will help the search engines determine the focus of your page.