Let’s be honest: Millions of terms for digital marketing metrics exist for web design, SEO tactics, and content creation. It becomes all the more daunting to keep them all aligned and optimize them. Unfortunately, the URL strategy and slugs suffer. Hold on. What is a URL slug, why is it important, and how can we optimize it? You will get insights on such questions in this blog. 

You don’t need to worry if you are unable to adopt these strategies in your business website, as there are many affordable SEO marketing services to help you. If you are stuck, you can directly reach out to them. 

Now, let’s get started.

What is an SEO Slug?

A slug in SEO is the end part of the URL address identifying a particular page or post. It provides readers with a concise overview of the contents of the web page. 

A website’s homepage doesn’t have a slug, but all other pages will have one that automatically generates as you go forward with creating a page. But an automated slug is not that useful as compared to the one you create for yourself. Thus, you must know the importance of slugs and how to optimize them. 

Why is Slug Important in SEO?

SEO Slug helps search engines understand the subject matter of your web page better. It also helps get traffic to your blogs. Let’s understand it this way. You must have come across some links combining a long format of letters and numbers. Doesn’t that look irritating and untrustworthy on the search bar? Obviously, it does. Search engine algorithms are designed in a way that studies clean, clear, and optimized content. Shorter slugs are useful for the users and search engines to comprehend your pages. And it significantly performs a role in keyword ranking. Besides, a concise and clear slug compels the users to trust your site and hence leads to greater engagement. 

How to Optimize Your Slug?

Now that you know the importance of URL slugs, what do you think it takes to craft the right one? Let’s find out. 

Concise and easy

A good URL slug is short, crisp, and concise. People find it challenging to read or remember the long URLs. Experts advise using less than five words in your SEO slug. Too long a URL will get truncated in Google Search Results. This might not hamper your SEO efforts, but the snippet page doesn’t appear good. 

Be descriptive

What is the chief aim of URL slugs? Making URLs more user-friendly. There are many times when Google Search Results shows the URL of your page. And it further impacts whether the audience will click on your snippet. So, you can’t experiment much here. Carefully include a short and accurate target keyword in the URL to make things easy. 

Avoid using stop words.

No wonder using the stop words like “and” or “the” can enhance the readability and are an inseparable part of the sentence structure. However, using them frequently in your SEO slug will ruin your SEO practices. Search engines don’t take into account these stop words while indexing your content and even find it daunting to identify the main keywords. Avoiding the usage of stop words ensures transparency and focus in your URLs. Thus, it improves the ranking of your website in addition to boosting its exposure. 

Using only lowercase letters

URLs are case-sensitive. So, use only lowercase characters to enhance the readability, avoiding duplicate content issues, thereby simplifying for the consumers to share them further. Additionally, different servers have different ways to read uppercase and lowercase letters. And using only lowercase characters ensures clarity while linking to your page. 

Avoiding keyword stuffing 

Who likes clutter? I know for a fact why keywords are important in research and how important it is to include a primary keyword in your text. But don’t just use it mindlessly and clutter your text with it. Stuffing the content with keywords can result in lower search engine rankings and may mark it as spammy. Organically use them in your content. You can also use secondary or supplementary keywords to increase the number of visitors visiting your website. 

Update old slugs

If you have website pages that don’t get along well with the best practices, it is best to update your slugs. But don’t do that too often, as it can hamper the search engine rankings for your website. Low-performing pages can be a good starting point for your rankings. If you are at the higher side of the risk for your older pages, an alternative optimization strategy can work well. After deciding on the slug, do whatever it takes to keep it the same.