When we start writing a new post, WordPress automatically creates a URL for the post using our blog’s address, the date, and post title. Great, now you don’t have to worry about your post’s URL, right? All taken care of.

Not quite. You don’t need to lose sleep over your post URLs, but paying some attention to the post slug — the bit of the URL after the address and date — can have a nice traffic payoff.

“I’m still not sure what a slug is!”

The slug is the bit of your post’s (or page’s) URL that describes what that specific post is about. Here’s the URL of this post, with the slug in bold:

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2014/08/15/post-slugs/

If I’d used the URL that WordPress auto-generated for me based on the post title, the slug would have been:

http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2014/08/15/all-about-slugs-not-the-slimy-kind/

They both get the job done, but one…