If you are a blogger or anyone pursuing an online career, this article is specially made for you. This article will equally benefit writers, bloggers as well as SEO professionals. In this article, we will cover about slug, stop words, 301 permanent redirects, editing post of a new post in WP, changing post URL of the published post and setting up redirection in WP.
You might have posted a couple of blogs and come to know about on-page SEO recently. If this is the case, you surely want to optimize your blog right?
Sadly you might have encountered 404 errors and various other issues which trying to edit the post slug of your previously published post. So, before moving on to the solution, we must be familiar with certain terms and terminology related to SEO. Learning these terms helps you to clearly analyze SEO technique and make your content more and more search engine friendly.
Understanding post slug in SEO
The post slug is the words which come in your blog post link after your domain name. For example:
In the above screenshot "adsense-rpm-and-increase-adsense-rpm" is the slug. If you are a WordPress user, slug for your post is created automatically from the title. You can edit the auto-generated slug to make it more SEO friendly.
The auto-generated slug looks something like this " what-is-rpm-adsense-and-how-to-increase-rpm-adsense". The problem with default slug is that there are a lot of stop words which are completely useless and is not recommended. Too much stop words are never recommended when you are optimizing your posts for specific keywords.
Understanding stop words in SEO
Stops words are the common words that are filtered by a search engine like Google in a query. For example- a, an, the, are, by, both to name few.
There are many other stop words that should not be included as the part of your post slug. Those stop words not weighted heavily or used to determine relevancy in the search algorithm.
• Post slug with stop words: what-is-rpm-adsense-and-how-to-increase-rpm-adsense
• Post slug without stop words: rpm-adsense
In the first example, you can 10 words in the post slug and only 2 in the second one. This actually means the important keywords in the first slug (rpm-adsense) are given only half the weight in case there were no SEO stop words. But the second slug contains more keyword juice than the first slug.
You should carefully try to remove the stop words in your post's title and description too. If you already have many posts, don't go and try to edit all of them. Just consider those posts which are not performing well.
Understanding 301 redirect
We use 301 redirects while changing the post URL or permalink structure. This is the perfect method to ensure if the users, as well as a search engine, are directed to the correct page. The status code 301 means that your page has been permanently moved to the new location. If you are WordPress users, you can redirect with the help of various plugins available or using .htaccess at the server level.
This is one of the best methods to move your website from Blogspot to WordPress or from WordPress.com to WordPess.org.
Learning to change the post URL of the newly created blog post
If you are WordPress users, simply click " Edit" icon below the post title for changing the post slug. Now, you can remove the stop words and remember to put (-) between words. Make sure to practice this for all of your upcoming posts.
Learning to change the already published post's URL
The same process above can be followed for editing already published posts. But editing the existing slug results in the broken post. Those old slugs will result in 404 broken page if Google has already indexed your slug or shared on social media. You can avoid this with the help of the 301 redirect feature.
How to redirect post in WordPress?
One of the major advantages of using WordPress is its simplicity. Even tedious job can be done simply with the help of various available plugins. You can simply use " Free redirection plugin". Redirection features are available if you are using Yoast SEO premium. You can use any plugins as per your wish but keep in mind that it should be 301 redirections. Now, when you will set up redirection, someone clicking the old slug will be automatically redirected to the new URL. This is the feature to ensure that you won't lose any traffic after changing the post slug of a previously published post.
Some important points to remember while dealing with editing already published posts.
1. You can edit your old post slug when you are setting up 301 redirects.
2. When you change slug and set up 301 redirects, you won't lose any traffic.
3. You may lose some social media shares as the link changes.
4. Don't change the slug of a high ranking blog post.
So, above are the practices for you as a new as well as old bloggers. Now, you can start editing the post that is not performing well.
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