should my categories be in the permalinks? i dont know if this is recommended or not. my inclination is just to use the post name setting, but i dont know. ive heard incorporating categories into it is good for SEO.

any input?

Hi Matt,

Yes, I think the preferred method is to have the categories in the permalink.

However, for SEO there is a plugin you can use that just can't be beat.
www.ostraining.com/blog/wordpress/wordpress-seo-by-yoast/

Plug in to Yoast and follow his advice. He is really good at this.

Ed

the theme i purchased is running off of the "all in one seo pack"

how good is that one in comparison? it doesnt have as high of ratings...

i am kinda thinking that something along lines of theyogablog.com/articles/sample-post would be redundant and seems unnecessary. but i know down the road i will have the category of "interviews" and that wouldnt be redundant. in fact it would be necessary. should i simply customize each interview permalink individually with the "edit" button so its in the URL?

seems like it should work...i dont know though. im new to all this SEO stuff

The yoast one is better in my opinion. It's easy enough to try it. It won't affect your theme.

If you're afraid of that happening, just create a wordpress test site in a subdirectory and test it out there with a generic installation and see if you like it.

You can have as many wordpress sites as there is room for them on your server. If you want to see how something works, just make a new site in a new directory and check it out. That way you don't have to experiment on your live site.

You should always have one or more test sites going at the same time.

Cheers,
Ed