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 atomically 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.

To enable custom permalinks, log in to the admin area of your Wordpress blog and go to Options -> Permalinks. Then go down to Custom and insert /%post_id%/%postname%/. Granted, you can use one of many different operators to define your post slugs, but I prefer the ID followed by the post name.

The second thing you need to consider is your users. Now that your post slugs are automatically generating URLs that contain words, you should to one step further and customize them per post.