: Choosing the best URLs for a Picture Blog site on Wordpress I would like to select the best SEO friendly URL format for my WordPress based picture site. But I am not sure about the impact

@Gretchen104

Basically you should always consider Google's one aim is to provide most relevant content to it's users - so "user friendly" and SEO-friendly are very close to each other. Once you start trying to optimize for search engines too much, Google might find it suspicious and you might even get punished.

That said I have to add there there are actually ways to optimize images especially for SEO - and yes, it might be a bit time consuming: a) not only name the URL of the page showing the picture but also the file itself meaningful. Something like "DSCN000745.JPG" is less attractive to search engines than "paris-eiffel-tower-07.jpg". And then again also this little bit of SEO-friendliness is basically related to human-friendliness since users uploading or downloading such a file will already understand from the file name what to expect from the image.

And then back to the page-URL question: I would always prefer example.com/picture/eiffel-tower-ID over example.com/eiffel-tower-ID. The second URL might be shorter and therefore "eiffel tower" might get ranked higher, but the first longer URL puts your pages ("eiffel-tower-ID") into the right context ("pictures").

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@YK1175434

If I were you, I will choose the shortest URL to easily remember it (for you and your visitors). And if you want to put unique id at the end of the URL, you can do it.

If it's not important to you to distinguish pages and pictures in URLs, you can choose this kind of URL for images: example.com/imageTitle-{Unique_ID}.
Otherwise, the following solution seems to me good: example.com/picture/imageTitle-{Unique_ID}.
For SEO purposes, try to put keywords in URLs with the imageTitle variable but always choose keywords regarding the image.

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@BetL925

If you can avoid numbers in the URL, it is better for users. When users see a full URL (like posted into a forum) they appreciate having the slug in it to let them know what it is likely to be when they click on it. Having id numbers in the URL reduce the click through rate a small amount. Users seem to appreciate descriptive, but uncomplicated URLs.

If you put ids in the URLs, try to put them near the beginning to avoid problems with URL truncation, as described in this question: SEO : urls : best place for the id

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