Every little thing you do to up your search engine ranking plays a part in making your website more discoverable. From keywords and quality content to meta descriptions and URLs. Yes, even how your link looks— which words you use, and how many, count. So, read below to find out about how customizing URL slugs and why they can help your search engine optimization (SEO).
What is a Slug?
Nope. Not those little creatures in your garden. The slugs we’re talking about are just the words that come after the .com in a URL. Ideally, they’re meant to convey specific information about the contents of the page. When your URL slug isn’t optimized for SEO, it looks messy. It also appears less trustworthy and limits your search engine ranking. Below are some examples for reference.
Non-Optimized URL slug
https://eringobler.com/s?k=investing+for+millennials+volume+3&ref=nb_sb_noss_1
Optimized Slug
You probably noticed the topic was much easier to determine in the optimized slug. Also, it looks cleaner, right?
So, Why is Customizing URL Slugs Significant?
Customizing your URL slugs not only makes your content easier to interpret for readers, it also allows search engine algorithms to understand the meaning and significance. This is important because search engine software takes the information it gets from your URL slug and categorizes it in a database.
Together with keywords and phrases, your URL slug feeds the search engines the data it needs to index and rank your website’s content by relevance. The more relevant your content seems, the easier it is to find.
Some Tips on Using URL Slugs
At Monkey C Media we build most of our author websites in WordPress. Why? Because that allows us to control the look, the feel, the functionality, and things like URL slugs. We optimize our websites to include powerful SEO tactics—like slugs (also known as permalinks). We program our sites to automatically include the category and article title (or page title) in the permalink/slug. This is important because otherwise the slug would be based on the database default and end up looking something like this that (not optimized) URL slug above. It seems a bit cluttered, right? Well search engine algorithms and site visitors will thinks so too.
Don’t use customized URL slugs as clickbait
It may be tempting to change your URL slug to something catchy or attention grabbing, but it’s best to stick with the title of the article and relevant keywords. You’ll just confuse readers and the search engines algorithms when you do otherwise. In fact, you’ll get more SEO relevance if your page title (or article title) closely matches your slug. So, that means, write good titles that tell people exactly what your article is about and they will be more likely to find it (and so will the search engines).
Start by using focus keywords in your blog title
This is the first step to easily optimizing your URL slug, and it makes it that much easier to customize too. Avoid unnecessary words and watch your character count.
Although you can use what are called Stop Words (in, and, the, etc.) in your slug, if they’re not necessary, don’t bother. You need those stop words in your title and the page content because otherwise everything will read like nonsense. But in a slug, character count should be limited to 3-6 words ideally. Your total character count for your URL should be fewer than 65. Focus on the most relevant words.
For example if your blog title is “My Favorite Blueberry Jam Recipe Was My Grandmother’s.” Say your keyword phrase is Blueberry Jam Recipe. That’s what your URL slug should be. Words like “My” and “Favorite” are not relevant to a search engine. Makes sense, right?
More Useful Information on URL Slugs
If you have a WordPress site you’re already more than halfway there (assuming your programmer customized your permalink structure). WordPress permalink structure will ensure that your URLs are clean and concise. Plus, there’s options for plug-ins.
The Yoast SEO plugin allows you to manually change your slug easily.
Simply click on your SEO analysis at the bottom of your blog post.
Beneath where you add your SEO Keyphrase, and your meta description, you’ll notice below “SEO title” there is “Slug.” It already has the default slug in there. And your SEO analysis will tell you if there are enough keywords in your slug, but that doesn’t mean you can’t optimize the slug by customizing it!
From here you can delete those unnecessary or “stop words” and further streamline your slug using the tips mentioned above. Easy Peasy!
If you’ve built your own site via something besides WordPress there are other ways to customize your URL slugs. Here’s what Squarespace has to say about customizing URL slugs.
Customizing your URL slug for search engine optimization isn’t as daunting as it sounds now, right? Once you know a few little tips, like we listed above, it will become second nature. It’s just one of the many little things you can do to contribute to better ranking and better visibility—and every little bit adds up!
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