Beaten to death- WordPress best SEO Permalinks v.s. Performance

Anyone familiair with WordPress knows about the “do not start Permalink with a Text String” due to performance reasons.

Then you hear SEO experts chirping the best is to have /%category%/%postname%/

I actually feel this is much nicer setup, and wish to have this for my blog but I’m worried about the performance issue. Prepending with a Post ID or a Date, just seems to add irrelevant information to the URL.

THEN you see people adding .php or .html extensions to the end of their permalinks… what’s the deal with this one!?

Doing a google search on this topic just returns the same articles with newer post dates- from different websites.

What are your opinions on this matter? What works best for you?

SEO friendly url is one that has the target keyword in it. That’s it. If efficiency is an issue, you can use any format that is considered optimal, /%post_id%/%postname%/ is just as SEO friendly.

I use this version! I don’t think there is any major differences in SEO when comparing the exact permalinks format… unless you are having a very long and unusual url… else, I believe starting with a number or category doesn’t really matter so much.