Marketers, website owners, and beginners in the SEO industry often come across the term “slug”. However, very few people have an in-depth comprehension of slug.
A URL or SEO slug is that part of a website’s URL which explains what a page is all about. This facilitates easy and convenient page readability for the users. It identifies the page on a site that can be read by the audience.
Now let’s get to know what slug in WordPress is. Slug is that part of URL in WordPress which can be editable and modified while composing a new post. Even if you have more variables in your URL, slug in your WordPress will still be the editable portion of the URL.
What is a slug in SEO
The benefit of having slug in SEO is that you can alter the words to ensure that it consists of the words that you want to be ranked for. This is crucial as Google uses it as an indicator to identify what your webpage is all about. Moreover, it is also what audiences find in the search results.
How to optimize the slug
There are many things that you need to consider while creating an appropriate slug for your webpage or post. Here are some key elements which you should take into consideration:
No more use of stop words
Get rid of the words that are unnecessarily used in the post. Overuse of words such as “the”, “a“, “and”, and other similar ones should be filtered and removed.
Increase focus
It is not just the stop words that you need to filter out but also all those words which you do not really need. However, ensure that your slug makes sense.
Make it concise and descriptive at the same time
The URL of the webpage is displayed in search results. However, there are many times when the URL is replaced with SEO breadcrumbs. This is when Google will display all phrases that are relevant and matching right from the search query. It is crucial to ensure a good presence of keywords when you opt for optimizing the slugs. You also need to give equal importance to filtering out stop words as search engines will not prefer blog or web posts having too much stop words. You will help yourself in getting ranked by the search engines by keeping your slug clean.
