Best URL format for SEO?... Do names and dates help?

[DreadBelly]

Hi, just to introduce myself - I joined the forum recently and it's already been very useful. There are so many insightful questions being discussed and answered - it's a fantastic resource and I'm learning so much. So thanks!

I've actually got a question of my own that relates to a website I'm working on:

In order to help the site rank for certain keywords, I've been publishing SEO posts on a given keyword.

However, the posts are not performing as I had expected. I'm a bit stumped because the posts are easy to read and optimised according to best-practice. However, while URLs across the rest of the site are formatted as Post Name, posts URLs are formatted as Date-Name.

Could this be affecting SEO performance?

And if I were to change this to a Post Name format, whether this would cause any issues? For instance, on other pages on the site that link to the posts, would it cause broken links because of URL changes.

I hope this question makes sense - I've tried to word it as clearly as I can but please let me know if any further information is required :)

Thanks

[goodroi]

Using the post title (which hopefully has a keyword or two) in your url tends to perform the best but it won't work miracles when it comes to rankings. URLs tend to have a lower importance on rankings.

#1 - Make sure Googlebot can crawl the url.
#2 - Have the URL look relevant to entice users seeing it in the serp.
#3 - Keep it simple & easy to make it easier for people to manually go to it.

[nshep]

On a personal note, I would avoid using the date in your permalinks since they can make your content not up to date to human users. I personally don't really click on articles older than 2015 at this point, so unless it's very obvious that your content has been updated since it was posted, you might turn off others like me.

[lucy24]

I personally don't really click on articles older than 2015

This aspect depends very much on the subject matter. It's one thing if you want to know what Celebrity McFamousface is up to; it's another if you want to know what happened to Strix albifrons.

[tangor]

@DreadBelly ... Welcome to Webmasterworld!

From an "seo" point of view urls are kind of low in the mix. As for what your url should be, look to the user first, then go from there. As far as "dates" are concerned g and the rest can read the "last updated" during their indexing and probably go with that before whatever is in the url.