If there is one thing that I hate about SEO, other than that SEO needs to exist, it is that pretty much no question related to on-page aspects has a definitive answer. Search engine optimizers are nothing more than a bunch of guys who struck it lucky a few times with their own properties and then proclaimed themselves as experts, nothing other than their own answer can be correct, and any clients previous SEO contractor is automatically dismissed as clueless or out of touch. The truth is that there isn’t ever really a right or wrong answer to many questions, and if something does become too obvious it isn’t long until Google changes the game again by tweaking some numbers in their algorithm.

One of those unanswerable questions is…. What is the best permalink structure for WordPress? It is one that cannot be given a conclusive answer, any answer will only convey somebodies ideals, and often those ideals will be based upon aesthetics rather than any real SEO value. The existence of your primary keywords in your URL possibly helps you to rank for your chosen phrase, but the impact will no doubt be minimal. Some optimizers will suggest that you have numbers in your post URLs and not in your page URLs so that the major search engines can distinguish between your posts and your pages, personally I consider this to be complete rubbish. If you have a problem with Google ranking your pages above your posts, and you don’t consider your pages to be of any importance, then the solution is to simply noindex the unimportant content using any one of the numerous WordPress noindex plugins – the can be found in the WordPress plugin directory with relative ease.

Perhaps the only thing that people have reached a general consensus on is that you do need to change your URL structure from the default WordPress setting which uses nothing other than a post number. There is a pretty much endless list of formats that you can choose as an alternative, but the most popular ones are perhaps those that show a post date like this:

Or the use of the post category (or categories in the case of a hierarchy) followed by the post title, which is the structure that I tend to use, like this:

Alternatively, as touched upon above, you can simply end it with the post title like this:

Some optimizers believe that using a category before the post title helps a little with Google trust, particularly if your category pages themselves gain authority, but again this is all speculation. I have had thinks rank well using any one of numerous permalink structures, and I’m certainly not the only person around who doesn’t consider permalink structure to be of great importance, your choice of keywords in your post titles and the appropriate use of H1, H2, and H3 tags is infinitely more important. Feel free to disagree in the comments box though!