To Slug or not To Slug

To Slug or not To Slug

To Slug or not To Slug

Brian over Copyblogger. The post was titled “Six Common Punctuation Errors that Bedevil Bloggers.” The URL, however, was http://www.copyblogger.com/punctuation-mistakes/
You can see the potential of this little Slug feature. So simple, yet so useful.
If you publish a post on WordPress without specifying the post Slug, W/Press will create a URL that is equal to the post title (provided you are already using an optimal URL structure).
Most of the times, however, that URL will not be search engine optimized.
To Slug or not To Slug 
You probably want to write your headlines and post titles with humans in mind. After all, you need to make them catchy and motivate the reader to check the rest of the content. The same is not true for URLs. While a clean URL structure that contains a description of the page might benefit human users, usually they are more relevant to search engines.
That is where the WordPress post Slug feature comes into play. On the little box that appears on the right of your text editor you can manually set the URL structure for that post. As you can see from the example I mentioned, Brian knew that many of the words used in the title of the post would not be used by users searching for similar information. He decided, therefore, to use just the keywords “punctuation” and “mistakes” in the URL.
When crafting your post Slug try to focus on the keywords that are used on popular search queries, and remember that the fewer keywords you use, the higher their relative value.
Some people were already aware of this trick, but we think it was worth sharing this Slug again.

Iimage green slug To Slug or not To Slug

To Slug or not To Slug

 

 

 

To Slug or not To Slug ? Now thats all well and good but here is the problem if you do that very sensible thing you will compromise your SEO because then the URL will not match your Focus Keyword.

If you are dedicatedly trying to get you SEO right with the help of SEO Yoast this is going to mess up your mind and give you sleepless nights.

 

Keyword   (Slug or no Slug)            Keyword   (To Slug or not To Slug)  

Your focus keyword was found in:           Your focus keyword was found in:

Article Heading: Yes (1)                               Article Heading: Yes (1)
Page title: Yes (1)                                           Page title: Yes (1)
Page URL: No (1)                                           Page URL: Yes (1)
Content: Yes (4)                                             Content: Yes (4)
Meta description: Yes (1)                              Meta description: Yes (1)

Best to use the same key words for both, that way – no conflict. Categories and tags, can we think have the same key words, if you feel compelled to use any, many would argue this point by point, but just remember the poor old visitor looking at this URL : http://1stpro.com/categories/to-slug-or-not-to-slug/tag/lug-oVr-no-slug/slug/slug-or-no-slug/ insted of this URL : http://1stpro.com/to-slug-or-not-to-slug/

We think one category for all your posts with a unique label (tag) for each post, forget all about the smaller slug and make everything the same,  the Slug may just be another bit of annoying SEO you realy don’t need.

 

 

 

 

 

To Slug or not To Slug

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