Making post links short with WordPress
By default WordPress puts the exact title of the blog post as its post URL. Have a look here:
What this means is that, if you have a blog post titled: “This post have a very long title that runs for miles”
You will end up with a URL that looks something like:
http://www.wordpressblog.com/12/1/this-post-have-a-very-long-title-that-runs-for-miles/
Isn’t that irritating?
Take my word when I say that these long URLs do not come easily.
Long URLs have a lot of problems already attached with them:
- They are difficult to pass on to other bloggers or your readers.
- If you are passing them in Emails, then the long URL will break into half. The URL will no longer work correctly. There is nothing worse than someone replying back to your email saying that your link doesn’t work.
- Long URLs often get truncated. In such cases the user will end up at “page not found” page instead of your blog post
But I still haven’t told you of the BIGGEST problem with long URLs.
Long URLs are NOT Search engine friendly.
This is the BIGGEST of all the problems with long URLs.
Let me explain this further.
Let’s say you have a blog post that is titled:
“Wordpress Blogger Livejournal which blog service should you use?”
Then this is your default URL given by WordPress:“http://www.yourblog.com/213/wordpress-blogger-livejournal-which-blog-service-should-you-use/”
That’s NOT how your URL should look like if you want a top search engine ranking for such search terms. Absolutely not.
You want your URLs to be short and Search Engine Optimized.
Here is how:
If someone wants to compare some specific blogging platforms, they will type words like “wordpress”, “blogger”, “livejournal” etc…
They are less likely to type words like “which”, “should”, “you”, “use” etc… So I see that in your URL, only the keywords “wordpress, blogger” etc… are popular. Others are not.
Your URL contains 10 keywords. Only 3 among them are likely to be searched often and that’s what your important keywords are. What you are doing here is reducing the value of important keywords like “wordpress, blogger” etc… by adding more words like “which blog service you should use”.
So in conclusion:
Your post won’t have a well search engine optimized link. This will surely affect your search engine ranking.
Why? Because you have reduced the value of your main keywords.
So now you know why long URLs are bad. You also know that WordPress doesn’t really do much about it.
