How to Optimize Your URL Slug?

Why is a Slug Important for SEO?

A URL slug can be very powerful for keyword SEO. If a user were to search Google for “what is a slug,” the keywords in the URL structure of your content helps signal to Google that your content should be included on the SERP. A good slug can improve a user’s experience if it clearly states what the webpage is about.

Sometimes you may see a webpage URL with a chain of characters, letters, or numbers. These slugs can be confusing to users, and they may hesitate before clicking. Those kinds of slugs don’t look very trustworthy.

A good URL slug also helps the Google crawl bots understand how to get to your page and confirms the content on it.

Is There a Difference Between a URL Slug and a URL?

• The URL slug is the last part of a full URL.
• The URL itself is the entire web address for the marketing page.

How to Optimize Your URL Slugs?

1) Keep It Short

Ideally, you want to keep your URL slug as short as possible while ensuring it makes sense. Doing so allows users to understand what the content is about with ease. Plus, they’re more likely to remember the URL when it’s not just a long string of words, numbers, and letters.

According to experts, the ideal length of a slug for SEO is anywhere from 3 to 5 words. It also makes it easily visible when your page is shown as one of the digital results for a relevant search term.

2) Include Your Target Keyword

It’s nonnegotiable—you need to add your target keyword to your URL slug. But it does not have to match the exact title of the page. The best practice is to use only the exact keyword as your slug, plus a couple of extra words if necessary.

3) Use a Hyphen Between Words

Use a hyphen between words in the URL slugs on your website. This makes each URL visually clean and easy to read.

Since you cannot have spaces between the words in your URL (they render as “%20”), adding hyphens is a great way to break up the words in your slug.

4) Keep It Evergreen

Another recommendation is to keep URL slugs evergreen. This makes them relevant for your website users regardless of the time and date they will be accessing a given web page. So, avoid adding dates to your slug even if you use dates in your page title.

5) Use All Lowercase Letters

When optimizing your URL slugs, make sure only to use lowercase letters. Some consider this a stylistic choice. However, it’s also strongly recommended to avoid confusion or duplication issues on your web pages. Uppercase letters in your URL, along with the use of spaces or percentage characters, can trigger 404-page issues. To avoid this, stick to lowercase letters.

6) Remove Stop Words That Don’t Provide Meaning

To keep URL slugs short and neat, you should also consider removing stop words. These words offer no SEO value. So, it is often best to leave them out when structuring a page’s URL slug.

7) Update Old Slugs, but Be Careful

Many website owners update their content regularly to boost traffic and ensure the information on their site is up to date. This is no doubt a good SEO practice. But what about your URL slug? Should you update it as well?

The answer is that it depends. If the current slug is particularly long, doesn’t fit the updated digital content, or simply wasn’t optimized in the first place, then it may make sense to change it. But you need to be careful that you update the URL slug the right way and set up a redirect so that it doesn’t harm your SEO efforts.