Recently I came to know that URL slug is also an important factor in proper article and page optimization. A slug in URL is the part of the URL that comes after the domain of a URL. There are exceptions in many cases. But in most cases, a slug is like that if you are using WordPress or similar content platforms. This is the article URL for this particular post https://www.skyafar.com/url-slug-generator-online
, in this url-slug-generator-online
is the slug of the URL which is unique for the web page or article. In many cases, people don't give much importance to this part.
There are many advantages of using short slugs. It will be easy for users to quickly identify the article content. Most people rely on numbers and random strings for generating slugs which don't help people identify the content. This is not practical for large UGC websites where there are thousands of content published every day. But this is quite useful for business websites and blogs.
Best Ways to Optimize the slugs
If you are making use of WordPress for your blog, it automatically generates a slug from the post heading and it lacks some features.
- Don't change the slugs of existing articles
We are putting this as the first point, as people do often make this mistake as part of optimizing their existing site. It is not recommended to change slugs of articles after going live. If you can do redirection from old slugs to new ones, then this is okay. But in that case, also mass slug updates are not recommended.
- Use the Main Keyword in the Slug
This is the most relevant and important thing when creating slugs. Use the main content target key phrase or keyword as the slug or it should be included in the slug. That will help users easily understand the article content when seeing the URL, most of the time users may not see the title before reaching the article. It is advisable
- Make it Short and Remove the Commonly Used Words
Let's say we have got an article which says Top 10 Best Website Builders to Create Static Websites. We would recommend creating a slug "best-website-builders-static-websites". This may look complete, but it is clean and small. And it also removed stop words from the slug.
- Avoid Spaces and Upper Case English Letters
It is advisable to use small case letters in slug and also better to use hyphens instead of spaces between the words. That will make it easy to read and avoid duplicate contents when using small case letters. When using content platforms like blogger and WordPress, it automatically handles this point.
Best Online Tools to Generate Slug
WebAppSet Slug Generator
This URL slug generator helps to create simple slugs from the title. This tool has got several options when generating slugs.
- Remove Numbers
- Remove Stop Words
- Limit Length of the Slug
Above tool also got option to generate slugs in bulk using their bulk slug generation mode option.
Slugify.online
Like above tool, slugify online also have got bunch of options that will become handy in generating slug online.
WsTools Slug Generator
This is a bulk slug generator with option to use custom delimiter. This tool also support multiple languages which will be converted to English.
Hope you enjoyed reading this article.