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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? 
32 users commented in " Use The Power Of The Slug To Increase Search Engine Traffic "
Follow-up comment rss or Leave a TrackbackI use the SEO Title Tag plugin. I never knew I could do the same thing by just using the slug option. Good one, thanks.
Never. I just wanted you to come clean with it.
No probs BB
Well gee thanks K!
I don’t know……
I always wondered what the Slug meant. Thanks for this.
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[...] post title and the URL are different? If you want to know why, I’ll tell you how & why on my blog.…. ) plugim_url = “http://blogaboutyourblog.com/2007/08/18/why-post-on-weekends/”; [...]
I haven’t commented before but I just had to tell you, I’ve learned more about WP from you than I every could have on my own. I enjoy reading Blog about your Blog (which I read today
, the tips are incredibly helpful. Thank you.
[...] Use The Power Of The Slug To Increase Search Engine Traffic by Chris Lodge [...]
[...] Use The Power Of The Slug To Increase Search Engine Traffic by Chris Lodge [...]
Flo, that’s a really nice comment, thanks. Come back anytime
Thanks for the tip! I always knew there was some connection between the title and the slug but was never clear on what that connection was. Thanks for clearing the waters!
[...] Use The Power Of The Slug To Increase Search Engine Traffic by Chris Lodge [...]
The slug will not affect the title tag, just the URL of the post.
Well, there’s syncronicity for you. I’m just finishing up an ebook I’m writing, and one of the notes was “find out what the slug is”.
Today, I just deleted the note, because I had too many other things to do.
And now I come across this post.
Timing du excellence, or something.
Thanks!
Paul Hancox
Glad it was useful.
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Dude! Thanks so much for that tip!!
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Does this only work if used before publishing? Or can you make the change after publishing and get the same affect?
It will work afterwards Catherine, but it will change the URL of the post in question. This means that any links will be broken, so I wouldn’t advise it for older posts.
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