What you want is an explicit, keyword-rich URL! A search engine friendly URL… something more like; www.yoursite.com/guaranteed-bad-credit-mortgage-finance.html

However, a lot of people never get it quite from an SEO perspective, so lets shed some light on it.

Using Permalinks

This is controlled from within in Admin / Setting / Permalinks. The default is;

So, what we need to do is change that so we get an explicit Category / Page name format like this;

Having changed the setting, and clicked on “Save Changes” you will need to check that the required Mod_Rewrite code is inserted in your .HTACCESS file. Depending on how your site’s file access permissions are configured, WordPress may, or may not, be able to write directly to the .HTACCESS file.

If WP cannot automatically update .htaccess, you have two options;

1. Change the .htaccess file access permissions so that WP can write to it, then reset back to original permissions afterwards
2. Manually edit the .htaccess file and paste in the Mod_Rewrite code

Once you’ve completed this step, you will discover that editing page and posts now displays verbose, plain-English URL’s based on the page or post title as you enter and save pages / posts.

You can edit this as / if required, to ensure the URL is exactly as YOU want it to be…. For this site, page URLs start to look like this; www.website-designers.net.nz/the-best-plugins/title-meta-tags-management.htm

Post Slug

The “Post Slug” option also allows you to manually control the URL for the post

- and this appears in the Posts / Edit / Quick Edit options;

When the economic gravy pot is bubbling merrily, and there’s ample business gravy slopping over, even the mediocre get a share. But when the economic ice age casts midnight shadows at noon, and credit wolf packs softly pad the empty streets, howling balefully at the waning moon… then, when you’re sucking the last congealed streaks of business gravy off your tarnished website spoon, ask yourself… Can you afford your website to be second rate, disorganised and drifting ever further into the icy wastes of mediocrity? With a better understanding of why SEO is so important to your website’s success, could you continue to ignore it?

» Full article on The Why of of SEO