Using Post Slugs to Boost Wordpress SEO
October 15, 2007
Optimizing Wordpress for SEO is something I love talking about, and I figured I’d do a small Wordpress tips series every now and then. Today, I’ll be talking about using a feature that many bloggers forget or overlook when setting up a new post.
Post Slugs
Post Slugs are your key towards customizing permalinks for your blog posts. For example, if your post title was 10 make money online Tips then your default Wordpress Post Slug would be 10-Make-Money-Online-Tips, and would show up in your browser as www.somedomain.com/10-Make-Money-Online-Tips. It’s important to have keyword rich post slugs to enhance your SERPs, and subsequently garner more organic traffic from search engines.
Search Engines omit words such as ‘in,as,on,but, etc.‘, so make sure you customize your post slug to reflect the most important keywords in the post. For example, the post I wrote yesterday has a Title tag of ‘How to Stay Hidden From Google with NoFollow‘, but the post slug leads to ‘http://www.dailymoolah.com/2007/10/14/nofollow-seo-tutorial-faq/‘.
SEO Whammy
Customizing post slugs is just one of many tactics you can use to structure better SEO around your Wordpress blog. I’ll be covering other tactics in the next installment to the Wordpress Tips series 
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Posted in SEO, WP Efficiency
A Toronto Based Serial Entrepreneur and Internet Marketer
October 16th, 2007 at 4:09 am
Nice tip. However, if you change the post slug then you should make sure that it’s better than the default one. I’ve seen some people changing the slug into a crappy one…
October 16th, 2007 at 9:25 am
If the post you wrote was targeting the keyphrase “no-follow seo tutorial” then why didn’t you use that as the title? Or are you trying to rank for two different phrases using this method?
October 16th, 2007 at 9:42 am
@ Caroline : Two different reasons actually:
1) It’s best to have a catchy titles for human eyes first, and then keyword rich titles for SEO purposes
2) most people don’t pay attention to the post slug, so I make that as keyword rich as possible for SE’s.
Regards!
Dev
October 16th, 2007 at 9:45 am
Hmm thats interesting. I never really thought of changing the post slug but some posts dont lend themselves well to keyword optimisation in the title, but presumably that could work in the slug. Neat tip
October 17th, 2007 at 9:38 am
Dev,
This is a really valid tip. I actually did this myself for a very short while and totally forgot about it. Thanks so much of reminding me. I guess I have to pay more respect to this little exercise.
Monika
October 17th, 2007 at 11:22 am
Hi Monika,
I’m glad you liked the tip! Good to see you commenting here again
— Dev