What is a URL slug?
A URL slug is the part of a URL that identifies a specific page in a human-readable way. For a blog post titled "How to Track Links with UTM Parameters", the slug would be how-to-track-links-with-utm-parameters.
Good slugs are lowercase, use hyphens instead of spaces, contain no special characters, and describe the content accurately.
URL slug best practices
- Use hyphens, not underscores. Google treats hyphens as word separators; underscores join words together in search indexing.
- Keep it short. Shorter slugs are easier to share and read. Remove stop words like "a", "the", "and" when possible.
- Include your target keyword. The slug is an on-page SEO factor — put the primary keyword near the front.
- Never change a slug after publishing. Changing a slug breaks inbound links and loses page authority. Set it once and keep it.