If you aren’t a person that is fairly concious of search engine optimization when blogging, you probably having given much thought to the Post Slug field in your WordPress write panel. 

Creating a post slug basically allows you to create the post URL of your choice after your blog’s name, depending on the permalink structure that your blog uses.     By default, the post slug will be the blog post’s title.  For example, by default, this would post having the following URL:

http://wphacks.com/wordpress-tip-use-the-wordpress-post-slug

Unfortunately, this is not a very search engine friendly URL, as many of the keywords are at the end of the URL.   By setting my own custom post slug, I am able to create a better URL for my post:

http://wphacks.com/wordpress-post-slug

In this case, my post title focuses on the keywords for this post, creating more emphasis on them.  The great thing about this tip is it takes a very minimal amount of time to do and will become second nature once you’ve turned it into a habit. 

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There Are 7 Responses So Far. »

  1. 1 Bradly Fletchall
    Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 9:30 am

    Great tip. I had been wondering what the post slug did but I hadn’t really looked into it.

  2. 2 Kyle Eslick
    Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 9:27 pm

    No problem Bradley! Glad you found the post useful.

  3. 3 ranjitdo
    Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 7:55 pm

    Seo Slug is not working for me!
    i have upload to plugin dir,and than edit a post and save,still cannot see the seo link for my post.
    can you explain me why?

  4. 4 Starving Artist
    Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 5:01 pm

    This is a great tip. I thought I knew a thing or two about SEO but I never would have thought to optimize the slug with keywords.

  5. 5 Artful Dodger
    Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 4:17 pm

    Thanks man. I’ve been using the standard slugs that Wordpress give me and most of the time they look fine to me but now I will start to use these and see if I can notice any difference in search engine rankings and traffic using them ;)

  6. 6 Manpreet Singh Rehsi
    Friday, July 3rd, 2009 at 8:04 pm

    Does this version of plugin works on wp 2.8 ?



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