Where can I find SEO best practices for changing the URL of a page?

This site has lots of best practice information on redirects, including setting up sitewide redirects and more - http://www.mcanerin.com/en/articles/301-redirect.asp Give that a shot, hopefully it's helpful.

You can find SEO best practices for changing the URL of a page right here :) 1. Make the URL as meaningful to people as possible. 2. Make the URL as concise as possible. /////////// 1. Meaningfulness: Use natural, descriptive words to describe the page. Optionally, perform keyword research (google insights) on alternative natural, descriptive keyword phrases to target keyword phrases with, perhaps, a higher search volume or, perhaps, for less competition in the SERPs. 2. Conciseness: Brevity is the soul of wit. People and search engines don't like it when things are avoidably noisy. Example: http://exampledomain.com/Where-can-I-find-SEO-best-practices-for-changing-the-URL-of-a-page ////////////// ** After you change a URL, you want to be sure the old URL is properly redirected to the new URL for the page -- just like if you were to move to a new address, you'd want to set up a rule to forward snail-mailed bills. ;)

You should use 301 redirect for all old links to new links Find best practice for this case in “Moving your site" of Google guideline https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105

According to Matt Cutts of Google, URLs play a tiny part of SEO. So I'm not so certain that optimizing for slugs is really worth it. I might suggest optimizing for long tail keywords instead.

There's a plugin in Wordpress called Simple Redirect, if I'm not mistaken. Let's you 301 (permanent) redirect the old URL to the new one seamlessly. In time the new URL is indexed and the page authority is conserved.