What is a URL Slug? Is it Still Important for SEO in 2023

In today’s digital world, search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important aspects of any business. It can help increase your website traffic and rankings in Google.

However, many marketers are still unaware of what a URL slug is and how it can help improve their local SEO services. A URL slug is a short string of words that represents your page’s full title. It allows you to easily identify content on your website without having to read through the entire page title or description.

However, it’s not always easy to know exactly how certain features on your site affect its SEO. One such feature that may be affecting your site’s SEO is the URL slug:

What is a URL slug?

A URL slug is a short version of your full website URL. It’s commonly known as a permalink and it’s used to create a more user-friendly URL, which makes it easier for users to read and understand. The purpose of this article is not only to explain what a URL slug is but also why you should use them on your site.

Is URL slug important for SEO?

The short answer is yes. There are many factors that go into SEO Ajman, but one of the most important is your website’s URL structure. The more readable and user-friendly your URLs are, the better they’ll be for search engines and users alike.

URL slugs are made up of three parts:

• The domain name (the part before the first slash)
• The directory (or folder) name (the part after the first slash) and
• An optional file extension (.html, .php, .asp etc.) if there is one

SEO Best practices for URL slugs

Now that you know it is essential to optimize URL slugs to make them user-friendly, let us dive into the four best practices you should follow while customizing your slugs.

1. Keep them short yet informative

Including the primary topic or keyword in the URL slug is one of the finest SEO Ajman techniques, even though doing so won’t dramatically improve your ranks.

It is best to keep them brief and straightforward to make them easier to recall and understand while still conveying the main idea of the title.

Use /keyword-density as your slug in place of /what-is-keyword-density-and-why-it-is-important.

2. Use hyphens, not underscores, to separate words

The second mistake is using underscores to separate words, instead of hyphens. The reason for this is that underscores are not used in URLs, as they are often used to denote word breaks in a sentence.

So if you write “google-is-the-best-search-engine”, Google will see that as one word and rank your site low because there’s no way they can tell what each word means (and therefore how relevant the page may be).

This can also happen with accented characters or other special characters like & or # which most people don’t want showing up in their URL slug anyway (you never know who might end up typing those).

3. Avoid using dates in slugs

• Avoid using directories, as they can be confusing.
• Keep your URL slug short and simple. If you’re looking for a good rule of thumb, try around 10 characters or less. This will help with user experience and search engine optimization (SEO) because it will make the URL easier to remember.

4. Make them lowercase

It’s very important to make sure your URL slug is lowercase, and that it doesn’t include any special characters or symbols. Any other combination of letters or numbers can cause a lot of issues with the way Google indexes your website, and could even lead to your page ranking being penalized for not following best practices.

The reason for this is simple: URLs are case-sensitive, so if you have two different pages with “home” in their URL slugs, your visitors won’t be able to tell which one is the home page without visiting both pages!

Conclusion

As you can see, URL slugs are an important part of SEO. They help search engines understand what your page is about and rank it accordingly.