Why using wordpress out of the box is a bad idea in terms of the post link it creates ?

By default Wordpress slugs are ineffective in terms of SEO, forum links, and email links .If you take Wordpress out-of-the-box, it doesn’t do anything to help you make your URLs more effective. Wordpress just takes your post headline and sticks it as the post URL. You keep typing away headlines as looooooooooong as you want and Wordpress just keeps nodding away with you. What you need to do is manually shorten it. If you don’t, Wordpress just doesn’t care.

Here are two problems Wordpress causes by putting post titles as post slugs:

1. Long email links and forum links get broken.
2. It isn’t Search Engine optimized.

Long post links get broken in emails and forums.

If you have sent some of your long Wordpress blog post links to emails and forums, you will know exactly what I am talking about. Take this link for an example.
www.YourBlog.com/2/12/why-did-i-use-such-a-long-and-useless-URL-that-does-nothing-to-promote-my-products-in-google

If you mail this blog post to your readers, you will get complains saying that the link does not work. Even if the post really does exist, the URL will not be clickable in your reader’s mail program. The reason here is that the mail program actually breaks the link into two lines. The URL is too long for the email program. That is why it appears to be broken.

Not only in emails but long URLs also get broken in forums and a lot of other similar places. You talk in a forum about something with all your energy. You paste a link there to your blog post. After a while you notice that the link just doesn’t work. The long URL has again come back to you like instant karma for being lazy.

We now come to a more important problem.

Slugs are not automatically Search Engine Optimized.

Let’s say your slug contains Where should I go to buy vegetables in NewYork. Your main keywords or the keywords that you want a higher search engine rank for, are only buy, vegetables, and NewYork. Then what are the other words like where should I go to etc doing to your slug ?

Answer:

1. it’s reducing the value of your main keywords
2. it’s reducing the search engine rank of your important keywords.

Answer number 1
Unnecessary words reduces the value of your main keywords in your url .
Your URL contains 9 keywords, out of which only 3 are popular. So you are diluting the value of the keywords New York, buy and vegetables by adding where should I go to You do not want to aim for a higher search engine ranking for words like why, about.

You want to aim for higher search engine ranking for words that really matter to your blog post like New York, vegetables, etc. It is only the main keywords that really matter in your search engines ranking. The lesson you learnt here is: Do not include unnecessary words into your slug.

Answer number 2
Lower the value of your main keywords, lower your page will show in the search engine result for your important keywords.
This is simply a result of answer number 1.

So remember: After you write a great blog post ALWAYS edit its URL or the slug as Wordpress likes to call it. Because as another wise man on the internet once said:
Headlines Are For Humans, URLs Are For Robots.

You can edit your post link in Wordpress 2.5 by following this procedure.

1. Go to Write >> Post
2. Write a title in the title bar.
3. Click on the contents textbox.
4. A slug appears below you title bar.

Click on the edit button next to the slug to edit your slug.

Click on save after you edit the slug.

You can edit your post link in Wordpress 2.3 by following this procedure.

1. Go to Write >> Post.
2. Open the post slug box.
3. Type in your post slug in the textbox.

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