Image: Cyberinsekt

As most of you will no doubt know, you should write post titles to not only attract the attention of human eyes, but also that of search engines.

Using the right keywords or combination of words will often result in a large amount of search traffic, as anyone who’s managed to shoehorn the words “Britney Spears Undercarriage” into a post title will attest. However, sometimes you come up with a great title that you know isn’t quite SE friendly enough, or it’s contains so many words, the resulting URL will also be half a mile long.

If only there was a way to have the title you want, along with the SE friendly aspect…… Enter our friend, the WordPress Post Slug.

On your WP ‘Write Post’ page, there is a small box tucked in between the ‘Post Password’ and ‘Post Status’ boxes, and if you’ve noticed it at all, you may have noticed that it contains the words of the title.

Used correctly, you can enter your post title as normal, and then your preferred SE-friendly title, or keywords in the post slug box. You can see this in action on this very post - the title, as you can see, is:

Use The Power Of The Slug To Increase Search Engine Traffic

but if you look at the post URL in your browser, that should show:

http://blog-op.com/using-wordpress-post-slug/ 

Which is hopefully much closer to what someone may type into a search engine. So you can have your clever post title AND your Google friendly title at the same time. The features of WordPress never cease to keep surprising me.

For anyone about to comment that they already knew this: when did you plan on telling me?