I've read you don't want to put the date in the URL as Google can then determine your content is old when it gets old.

SPF, another argument against just having the title is, it will easier for the crawler to work on a folder structure, find all the posts in 2009, then 12, then title... that is faster than searching 1000s of posts using just title, esp. if you have a similar title. I have not seen any concrete evidence about the speed (the crawler speed is generally super fast). But for the programmer in me, it makes sense, so I have kept the dates so far. But it is too long and there is also a talk that long urls are a disadvantage for SEO. I don't want to think too much about these, so I checked GRS, TSD and FMF... all of them had dates, if it is working for them, I decided it should work for me as well...If it doesn't I could always change later...

But it is personal preference.

I think you have the default one selected in the permalink setting?

Change that to custom Structure

If you want category/posttitle , enter this -    /%category%/%postname%/ But if you use multiple categories for each post, this is not a good one.

You could have /%post_id%/%postname%/ instead. That would give a unique identifier for easier crawling and have the title of your post as well.

Or you could just have /%postname%/ That is what a lot of people have.

Anything with the %postname% is better than the default.

Also, I just checked your sitemap, all your permalinks are of this form

http://wallstreetchalkboard.com/?p=124

You are missing out on a valuable SEO field. Change your permalink to

http://wallstreetchalkboard.com/date or category or just nothing]/[post title]

 

You can do that by

1) Installing a redirection plugin like Dean's Permalinks Migration

2) Changing the setting->permalinks setting pick one that includes title, some people say dates are bad and recommend http://url/title structure.

 

 

what would I set the old permalink structure as?       /?p=123/     <--- is that right?

http://wallstreetchalkboard.com/?p=124

You are missing out on a valuable SEO field. Change your permalink to

http://wallstreetchalkboard.com/date or category or just nothing]/[post title]

You can do that by

1) Installing a redirection plugin like Dean's Permalinks Migration

2) Changing the setting->permalinks setting pick one that includes title, some people say dates are bad and recommend http://url/title structure.

http://wordpress.org/extend/pl.....generator/

If you have problem with one, use the other one. Both of them pretty much do the same thing...

Compare this: http://wallstreetchalkboard.co.....itemap.xml

To this: http://moneymamba.com/sitemap.xml

I'm using this: http://4visions.nl/en/wordpres.....emap-feed/