One of the most important things you should do after setting up a website with WordPress is set your permalink structure, and a lot of people debate as to what is the best permalink structure.
First off, though, what are permalinks? Permalinks dictate what your links/URLs will look like whenever you create a new post or page in WordPress.
The default setting in WordPress is to assign new posts a number. This would be fine, but search engines look at the URL of a page to get a better idea of what that content is about, and a random number tells them nothing.
This is why we need to choose a better, more SEO friendly permalinks structure which makes it as easy for the search engines to decipher what our content is about as possible, and there are SEO permalinks which you can go with.
The Best Permalink Structure
My personal choice for the best permalink structure is to make your own in custom structure and make it “/%postname%/”. Note that the quotation marks are not part of the structure. This makes a new post look like “yoursite.com/yourkeyword” as opposed to “yoursite.com/123”, a much more SEO friendly permalinks structure indeed.
I want to also note that the other format which I use on this site itself is: %post_title% | %blog_title%.
In this permalink structure, I still include the post title first which is most important, but I include the title of the blog immediately following it which can help with branding and reinforcing the name of your site. The world’s top blogs use one or the other, so take your pick as these are the best two.
This video will explain more about SEO permalinks and why this is my choice for the best permalink structure: