Optimizing Your Post Titles in WordPress

A very sparsely used feature in WordPress by practically everybody who runs their blogs with it, is the Post slug feature. I have read in a few places that it can help in your search engine rankings, but the jury is still out on that.

Slugging it in WP

That's the little window that you see when you are writing your post in WP. I use ScribeFire a lot, so I usually don't log into my admin panel to write a post. But just to show you how this works I logged in for you all and wrote this post from within my admin panel.

As you can see the Title of this post says one thing and the URL in the browser address bar says "writing better titles for blogs". Now this post would show up in the search engine if anybody typed in that longtail keyword, probably way down the list - but show up it will. So when somebody does a search for that, they will probably end up seeing the URL and the Title of the post in the search results. Will it give you more chances of getting a click from that query? Seeing that there is a difference in the Title and the URL. Which gives you probably twice as more chances of being found for a different set of keywords.

My guess is that they would probably click because they would see from the outset that there is more to this than meets the eye. With a different title and URL a person may automatically think there is more to read here and will probably click.

I can't tell you of the countless times I've done a search for something and a bunch of results with "Rich Keyword" in the title and /rich-keyword/rich-keyword.htm as part of the URL come up only to show me nonsense text and a bunch of Ads. I usually spot these out now and skip them and look for more content and text before clicking.

Your visitors may be doing the same. So give it a try and see if it affects your SERP's and search engine visits in anyway. I'll let you know myself later on. Though it will be a pain in the butt to constantly log in and write a post from here.

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