Stephan Spencer has written a brief article highlighted by an interview he conducted with the infamous Matt Cutts. The article discusses why it’s a bad idea to have a ton of keywords as part of your URL permalink. In WordPress, depending upon how your permalink options are setup, whatever words are placed into the post title, are the same words that will appear within the permalink, unless you manually configured the post slug.

When Stephan asked Matt what is excessive in the length of a keyword-rich URL?, Matt responded with:

If you can make your title four- or five-words long – and it is pretty natural. If you have got a three, four or five words in your URL, that can be perfectly normal. As it gets a little longer, then it starts to look a little worse. Now, our algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.

The thing to be aware of is, ask yourself: “How does this look to a regular user?” – because if, at any time, somebody comes to your page or, maybe, a competitor does a search and finds 15 words all strung together like variants of the same word, then that does look like spam, and they often will send a spam report. Then somebody will go and check that out.

So, I would not make it a big habit of having tons and tons of words stuffed in there, because there are plenty of places on a page, where you can have relevant words and have them be helpful to users – and not have it come across as keyword stuffing.

While Stephan goes on to offer some tips on keyword permalink management, I have a tip of my own. When you are writing a blog post or an article, come up with 3-7 keywords at a maximum that are relevant, and give the reader a good idea as to what the article will be about. Once again, we come up against the word of Relevancy, and you don’t need 500 keywords in your permalink URL to be relevant.

I’ve seemed to have had success with my permalink setup. In case you were curious, this is how I have mine configured:

Custom: /%postname%/