Slightlymore | The online residence of Clinton the intertube sorcerer

This post is mainly aimed towards WordPress, Textpattern and (probably) a multitude of other CMS driven website users. ‘Smart’ web software will automatically create a ‘slug’ for your new article, but it’s not always best to trust the CMS to come up with the best URL for you.

Oh, by the way, a slug is a part of the URL which uniquely identifies a post in a CMS. For example, in the URL http://www.example.com/blog/my-new-post, the slug is my-new-post

The rant

Take my new FGQ – What does the -= operator do?. Auto-slug-generators will (mostly) create the slug what-does-the-operator-do – which I’m sure you’ll agree is not too useful. Firstly, it would be difficult from a user’s point of view to remember which characters to remove and add in to the URL, but secondly, from an SEO point of view, it’s not terribly descriptive. Thirdly, if I then wrote an article with the title what does the += operator do – wordpress would create a very similar slug.

The point

Most, if not all, CMS systems allow you to change the slug of the post or article. Most of them also automatically create one for you. I am making the point that the automatically created slug is not always the best. When you create a new post, take a moment to think about what you’re trying to say, how people might search for it, and optimise for both. For example, this post is called Don’t leave post slugs as the default, but I have decided that the best way to describe it SEO-wise is post-slug-optimisation. It’s a minor thing, but it can make all the difference between being on the first or second page on google.