Best Use of Slugs?

A post slug is the text that represents the blog post that you've written. In WordPress, the first thing you want to do is set up semantic URLs in your permalinks (options>permalinks). With semantic URLs enabled, instead of mydomain.com/?p=175 you use a permalink with words: mydomain.com/2007/11/11/my-post-slug/ Post slugs have been verified as an important component to blogging SEO. As well, you can leverage a post slug to provide different wording than your blog post title. My title might be "Using Post Slugs for SEO" but my post slug might be "wordpress-permalink-postslug-seo". Notice how I added wordpress and made post slug one word. Now those terms will be indexed as well.

I figured it out! I looked again at the WP documentation and found what I needed to do to change the default url. I then manually changed all of the slugs from the default post titles to seo-friendly slugs.  I had tried to do this before but looked at the wrong info. Thanks for your helpful comments!

Thank you, douglaskarr. My blog does have this "mydomain.com/?p=175" issue. I thought that if no slug was entered that WordPress would by default use the post title as the slug but that doesn't seem to be the case. I can understand having a more url-friendly slug like in your example "postslug-seo" but what is the adantage of having "wordpress-permalink" as part of the slug?

Probably b/c more people would actually search for the phrase "wordpress permalink" vs. "postslug seo" Therefore increasing your chance for being found for that phrase.

Why would someone search for "wordpress permalink"? Apologies if this should be obvious but I am not familiar with the benefits of this.

Thanks Brian, I totally understand what you mean about targeting slugs for seo purposes. My confusion was in that I didn't view "wordpress permalink" as something that would be very likely to be searched for so I didn't understand why that needed to be in the slug.

Without doing any keyword research my guess would be more people will search for wordpress permalink than postslug seo.  Therefore in accordance to SEO 101 you would want to target the keyword that will potentially generate the most traffic. (and still be relevant in describing what the page is about)

well said douglas. I would also point out this is good for any site, not just a blog.

Brian makes an excellent point - one that seems to be lost on most websites. I should have added that you need not have semantic URL capabilities, either. Google will parse folder and file names: http://www.mysite.com/myfolder/name-file-seo.html This will index myfolder, name, file, seo.

Good post.