I have been a little slow in getting to grips with using the Wordpress post slug box to best effect, maybe the word ’slug’ just put me off! But I have done my homework and this is what I am doing now. You have probably noticed that words appear in the post slug box by default and if you leave them, your post slug will consist of the words that appear in the title of your blog. If your post title is long, this can disadvantage you because the search engines often penalise blog entries with over-long URLs (because they are often used in that way by spammers). The other down side to the default post slug is that it will be identical to your post title - which you wrote to attract readers. The post slug is read by the search engines and, again, they can mark your blog down for the duplication between the post permalink and post slug. So you can improve your SEO and ranking by typing into the slug box the most import keyword phrase that you used in the post, that is the one that you want the search engines to notice.

I am making the assumption that you have already optimised your Wordpress permalinks for the search engines - if you are still allowing your Wordpress to use the default permalink, find out how to optimize your Wordpress permalink here