To be honest you can use either of them really, if I am building a small store I tend to use the /%postname% structure since I don’t usually have a lot of categories but in larger WordPress sites it is better to use the /%category%/%postname%/ setting purely because this reduces the likelihood of there being problems with the WordPress rewrite rules and accessing certain required files such as the style sheet.

In addition if you are building a blog style site with WordPress there are certain functions like the calendar which require the use of a date structure to function properly so it’s always worth considering what functions you are going to use and what you are using the site for, you can also visit the WordPress Permalinks Codex page.

In reference to the static pages it really depends on what you want to do with the site, if I build a blog I very rarely use static pages, on this site you won’t see many because I have little use for them. But in contrast on my store style affiliate sites I use pages for static content because they don’t really change that much, they start out as a certain category listing page and stay as that. I use posts when I am allowing people to search on my site for item listings, the plugin I use (phpBay Search to Post) will create a post automatically each time a user searches for an item.

All-in-One-SEO is a must along with the spam ones as well. It’s very easy to get carried away but in my experience if you start with the top ones as a standard then you can’t go too far wrong.

I only started using a static page for my blogs about a month ago. Before that I wasn’t really sure why I would use it. I like to use the static page for info like you were saying but I also like to add a few useful videos with a bit of an explanation about each video.

I only have a couple of my blogs using static pages. I am not sure what would happen if I changed the other blogs to show a static page.

I some times get carried away with all the plugins I use but my most used plugin has to be All-in-One-SEO