If there isn’t, there should be! Recently I published an article by Arun Pal Singh, which gave some tips on optimising Wordpress blogs. One of the tips was about “slugs”, and I said that I’d have to look into that topic.

I’ve done just that! It’s all to do with how the URL for individual blog posts (the “permalink”) is constructed. There are a number of possible ways that this is done.

The default way is to have permalinks which look like this:

http://www.myblog.com/?p=123

.. which isn’t very search engine friendly

However, you can change this so that the permalink is taken from the title which you give to your post. For example, if you title your post “A Better Way To Make Blueberry Pie”, the permalink would become:

http://www.myblog.com/a-better-way-to-make-blueberry-pie

.. which is better than “?p=123″, but still not all that search engine friendly. This is where slugs come in (and not just through my garden door!). When you’re writing a Wordpress post, there’s a box on the right-hand side labeled “Post Slug”. This is where you can choose what permalink you want - and you can insert keywords which you want the search engines will pick up on - the URL is important to the search engines. Here’s a real life - and recent - example.

The post I made about interpreting Google Analytics has the title “How To Interpret Google Analytics Stats”. I put in the “post slug” box “google-analytics-videos” and the URL is

http://www.marketingsparks.com/google-analytics-videos/

How important is this? Well, it’s a starting point. The page got indexed by Google in less than 10 hours and got reasonable ranking for relevant key words. The next task I have is to find out how to change the <TITLE> tag for individual posts. This would be much more search engine friendly. I’ll keep you posted on this topic.

You see, I’m a real Wordpress newbie. But I’m learning fast. And one lady I’m learning from is Lorelle. Here’s her page about post slugs:

http://www.IanSays.com/Lorelle/PostSlugs