Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
🔗 What is a URL Slug?
Learn why optimizing the tail-end of your web addresses is critical for ranking on Google.
A slug is the part of a URL that identifies a particular page on a website in a readable form. For example, in the URL https://tooleble.com/tools/seo-tools/slug-generator/, the slug of this specific page is slug-generator.
When writing articles, your title might be "The Top 10 Ways to Learn React in 2024!". You can't put spaces or exclamation points in a web address natively, so a slug generator converts it into a safe format: top-10-ways-to-learn-react-in-2024.
Why do Slugs matter for SEO?
Search engines like Google read the words in your URL to understand what the page is about.
- Keyword Relevance: Having your primary topic keyword directly in your slug is one of the strongest on-page SEO signals you can send.
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User Experience: A clean URL like
/best-running-shoes/tells a user exactly what they are clicking on. A messy URL like/article?id=83921&lang=enlooks untrustworthy and confusing.
Best Practices for Slugs
- Keep it short: Try to keep your slugs under 5 words. Long URLs often get cut off in search results.
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Use Hyphens: Google has explicitly stated that hyphens (
-) are the preferred way to separate words in URLs, not underscores (_). We offer the underscore option for specific database naming conventions, but for web pages, always use hyphens. - Remove Stop Words: Words like "a", "an", "the", and "and" take up valuable space in a URL without adding any SEO value to the topic. Check the "Strip stop words" box above to automatically remove them!