SEO

URL Slug Best Practices and why they matter for SEO

Having a clean, clear, and short URL slug helps your website visitors and search engines comprehend your pages. Your URL slug can also be an untapped source of keyword ranking potential.

Deepti

Apr 29, 2024 — 2 min read

Photo by Kaleidico / Unsplash

Why URL Slugs Are Important For Your Webpages? 🌐

Did you know that the structure of your URLs can impact your website's SEO and user experience? URL slugs play a crucial role in making your webpages more readable, relevant, and optimized for search engines.

Let us dive into this article where we have explained why URL slugs matter and included 5 essential tips for crafting effective URL structures.

What is a URL Slug?

A URL Slug is part of the web address which comes after the domain name. It identifies a specific page and describes its content in a readable format.

For example, let us consider this URL: www.example.com/blog/seo-tips-for-beginners. In this case, /seo-tips-for-beginners is the slug that indicates that the page is about SEO tips for beginners.

URL Slugs play an important role in SEO by making your website more user-friendly and search-engine friendly. They help search engines understand the content of your web page and improve your site visibility on SERP.

5 Best Practices for URL Slugs

Use lowercase letters only - Since everything after the domain can be case-sensitive, using only lower-case URL slugs is a common practice to avoid duplicate content issues and 404 errors.
Separate words with hyphens for better readability. Google recommends using hyphens to separate words in your slug instead of underscores. It identifies hyphens as word separators, thereby helping it understand what the page is about.
Keep the slug short and descriptive. Short and clear slugs not only make it easy for readers to understand what content can be found on each page and help them remember the URL.
Avoid using stop words like "the", "and", "or". Stop words (like “the,” “in,” and “a”) are common words that search engines may ignore in search queries and search results. Because they don't affect the meaning of the query or content.
Include your focus keyword in the slug for SEO benefits. it's important to include keywords that improve your website's search visibility in the URL slug. This in turn increases your traffic which can alter your ranking.

Example of Good URL Slug

For a blog post about best practices on URL Slugs, you can choose a Slug like this, www.example.com/url-slugs-best-practices. This slug is clear, concise and contains the focus keyword which is good for SEO.