Online Marketing Blog

Giraffes

Do you customize the URLs (aka permalinks) on your blog posts? Chances are, you don’t. It’s not something a lot of users think about and it doesn’t need to happen, but it should.

The length of your URLs matters. Maybe not on a large-scale, but it does matter.

By default, WordPress takes your post title, converts it to lower case and replaces the spaces with dashes.

The downside comes when you have a long post title and you end up with something like this: http://www.toprankblog.com/1043/automatically-translate-your-blog-content-to-other-languages-to-appeal-to-a-larger-audience/

That’s a bit long isn’t it?

Instead, it’d look a lot nicer if it were shortened to something like: http://www.toprankblog.com/1043/translate/

Post slugs are one item that is commonly overlooked when setting up and writing to a blog. Either they are forgotten about all together, or they aren’t customized for usability sake. Optimized post slugs are not just for search engines, but people too.

The first thing we will talk about is search engines. Post slugs can also be referred to as permalinks. They are basically the URL that makes up the individual post page.

By default, WordPress automatically uses IDs and not words. Here is an example: http://example.com/?p=52. Now it’s short and simple, but gives no indication of what the page is. What we want to do is turn on custom permalinks.