What is Slug in WordPress?

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Have you checked all the points related to SEO? And don’t forget to correct slugs; it can hurt your SEO. Let it be understood by an example.

If you have an e-commerce store and you are selling Nike shoes online. In that case, if you make a URL that is not similar to a product. Then it may be possible that your click-through rate decreases. Because when a customer sees your landing page URL in the search engine. And they find it not relevant to their search terms. They don’t have the confidence to visit your site.

Having a relevant URL increases the click-through rate (CTR) because customers trust the link. 

So, choosing the correct slug for your page does matter a lot. Without it, your SEO may be incomplete.

What is slug?
What is slug?

Table of contents

What is a Slug? (URL)

We assume that you are familiar with URLs (it stands for Uniform Resource Locator, and it is a web address). A slug is an integral part of the URL. If you want to make a page on a website with a particular product name. Then the section used by the customer to make the landing page is known as the URL slug.

If you are using website builders like WordPress to make a good website. Then you will pick it up quickly. Slug in WordPress or (permalinks in WordPress) takes the page name as the URL slug. It is in your hands whether you want to change it or not.

For example, to start blogging on WordPress. You have a domain name xyz.com and you have a product. If you want to make a page called “product online”, then your URL will look like xyz.com/product online.

The Importance of URL Slugs

The URL slug is beneficial for both the search engine and the customer. Let it be understood one by one —

For User – From a user perspective (in the search engine result page). If you see the title and landing page URL similar to the search queries. Then the chance of clicking is higher otherwise you will switch to other results.

From Search Engine – When search engines like Google and Bing rank some pages, many factors matter. And the URL slug is one of them for On-Page SEO. It makes it easy for them to understand terms easily. It describes the SEO content of the landing page correctly.

So, URL slugs have a vital role to improve website ranking.

The Advantages of Using URL Slugs

There are numerous advantages to using URL slugs, some of which are listed below. It provides information about products.

It makes the URL clean and good. Using slugs in URLs makes our permalinks user-friendly. We can use keywords in our URL as a slug to make it more impactful.

How should you organize your slug?

Planning a customer and SEO-friendly URL is not an easy game. You have to cross-check every possible aspect of it. And make sure that the focused keyword is not excluded from URLs.

Let’s see a famous point that we should consider or adopt for complete SEO packages:

Remember to include your focus keyword

Remember, it is not mandatory to use your focus keyword in the URL. However, SEO professionals take advantage of it in SEO ranking. Therefore, double-check if you have used it in your slug or not.

Should be short but descriptive

You have seen that the landing page URL is shown on the search engine result page every time. So, using the correct URL format affects you in the long term. Because you will not have to change URLs every day, and it is something permanent.

Thus, choose the URL cleverly. Make it short and clean.

If you are using the date format of a permalink. Then it shows the original date of the published content. We are not saying or claiming. Using a date format permalink is the wrong way because it has its profit.

Make sure that all of the alphabets are in lowercase

When we write the title of any page, we keep the first letter in uppercase. In the same way, if you are making the URL of a landing page. Make sure every alphabet is in lowercase because it represents your URL cleanly and well. Customers love to see these kinds of URLs. They do not like uppercase letters in URLs.

Do not change URLs frequently.

URLs are something you do not want to change. Because you need more time to re-index it. Then redirect the old URL to the new one (because nobody wants a broken link on their website).

So, make sure your URL is permanent, and you can take more time to plan.

Make the slug relevant to the page content

We have mentioned the importance of relevant slugs in the URL. You can use your focus keyword as a slug. Many keyword research tools can deliver keyword difficulty and search volume. And you can use them as your URL slug.

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