What to Put in Your Website's URL Slugs

So you built a blog with quality material, added schema, implemented some keywords, set up your social media accounts. I assume you've taken care of your e-commerce SEO.

Not exactly.

One thing is simple to overlook, particularly if your online business was put up using a website builder like WooCommerce or Shopify:

Your domain's slugs.

Without them, no ecommerce SEO strategy is complete.

Why Do URL Slugs Exist?

A URL's slug is a component (Uniform Resource Locator). The final portion of a URL, or online address, known as the slug, indicates the precise web page that the URL goes to. For instance, the slug for www.ecommerce.com/category/product-name/ is "product-name".

WordPress' default slug is the page's name, like many other page builders. Although picking a URL slug based on the page's name can be successful, care should be taken.

Without a plan, using the default page slug can harm your SEO and user-friendliness.

What Makes URL Slugs Important

A page's content is understood by search engines like Google using a variety of characteristics, which also affect the page's ranking for certain search terms. One of these elements is the slug of a page's URL, thus it must make sense to search engines and accurately describe the content of the page.

Slugs contribute to the clickability of URLs and also serve to characterize page content for users.

The URL is displayed next to your page's title on search engine results pages (SERPs). Your URL with Google leads to the breadcrumbs shown below. The breadcrumbs say "domain > pages > text-to-slug" when the URL is https://freeonlinewebtools.com/text-to-slug.

As a result, a user's decision to click on your link may be influenced by your page's URL, particularly its slug. This is also true when someone sends you a link because illogical or dubious links are common.

All of this suggests that slugs are crucial to users and search engines, as well as to your business.

The Art of the Great Slug

1. Observe the Slug Character Best Practices

Despite the fact that the grammar rules for slugs are more like recommendations, it is still advisable to use the best practices.

Lowercase letters alone

Slugs can utilize capital letters, but having them all lowercase creates consistency and has a better visual appeal. When case sensitivity is used frequently, it also avoids typos and broken links.

Do not use special characters

A URL slug should not contain any special characters save dashes to denote spaces. Slugs with special characters look less professional and are more difficult to read.

In URLs, several characters also have unique meanings and may seem differently or cause issues. Spaces, for instance, will appear as "%20" in a slug.

Make Spaces using Hyphens

You can show spaces between words in slugs by using dashes or underscores due to the restrictions on special characters.

We advise using hyphens in place of underscores between the two. They are simpler to understand, and Google concurs with this statement.

Including a Trailing Slash

The "/" at the end of a URL slug is known as a trailing slash, and it is completely optional.

Many people recommend using the slash because it looks prettier and signifies that the URL is complete, just like.pdf does for a URL that points to a PDF file.

The trailing slash should be used to denote a container URI, according to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an organization charged with providing advice on web standards.

2. Slugs should relate to the page's content.

Slugs ought to appropriately describe the information on a page.

Search engines will rank your content for relevant search queries if your slugs remain relevant. Being the top result for a query is useless if people aren't interested in what your page has to offer.

Matching your slug to your H1 header is a frequent strategy. That is typically the title of the product or category for a product or category page; for blog content, it is the title of the blog post.\

Should Slugs Be the Same as the Page Title?

Page builders could frequently use the page title as the default slug for relevance reasons, although this is a practice to be aware of. If you copy the title, your slugs can end up being excessively long or adding unnecessary information if you ever edit the page's content.

There are ways to further optimize it, but the objective is to design a slug that gives readers an accurate impression of what they are clicking on.

3. Shorten URL slugs

Slugs that are both user- and SEO-friendly are brief, averaging 3 to 5 words. Short slugs are also simpler to distribute on social media networks with character constraints and easier to remember if users need to find them again. Short links are also less likely to be broken by users.

The main offender of lengthy URLs in terms of ecommerce SEO are parameters.

In addition to lengthening URLs, parameters make pages appear to Google as duplicate material, which is bad for SEO. Generally speaking, parameters also detract from the professionalism and click-worthiness of URLs by appending a long string of seemingly pointless characters.

However, parameters may be required for e-commerce websites, particularly if you offer a lot of goods. In addition to enabling additive product filtering and sorting for customers, parameters assist ecommerce organizations in tracking the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

Google's URL Parameters tool can assist you in managing your SEO if you need parameters.

Note: Google advises against utilizing the tool unless you are an SEO expert, your website has more than 1,000 pages, and numerous pages are flagged as duplicates. Otherwise, you can end up hurting your ecommerce SEO more than you help it.

4. Take Function Words Out

Function words include a, the, and, is, on, do, and of. According to linguistics, a function word is "a word whose purpose is more to convey grammatical relationship than the lexical meaning of a phrase."

These terms are sometimes referred to as stop words in relation to search engines or NLP.

Function words don't really help a search engine understand your content, so you can cut them out of slugs to make them shorter.

For real people, preserving function words is occasionally a good idea, but we'll cover that under the heading Prioritize Reader-Friendliness.

5. Eliminate Extraneous Words

Slugs may benefit from the removal of other superfluous words, but you must decide what qualifies as superfluous. While "your," "like," or "guide" may not always be necessary, they can be useful in other contexts.

Determine each word's importance to readers and search engines, and whether that value is more important than simplicity.

6. Put reader friendliness first

You can profit from the user advantages of effective slug writing by writing slugs that are reader-friendly.

Readers will understand a slug that accurately represents the content of the page. These aren't usually interchangeable.

For instance, cutting function words from a URL may make it shorter, but the reader will no longer understand the shortened version. Making the slug how-to-design-a-website into how-design-website causes confusion.

A keyword could be appropriate yet grammatically flawed. While unclear grammar isn't a priority, it can hinder reader comprehension.

Although a product ID or SKU number may specify the precise product that a page is for, the user is unaware of this information.

Always favor the reader when deciding between a more reader-friendly choice and a keyword or shorter URL.

7. Your slugs should contain keywords.

Slugs with keywords should be optimized, according to many sites. Even while this is a strategy to use, it shouldn't be the only one used.

Google's John Mueller and Matt Cutts both contend that while they do help a little, keywords in URLs are not essential to ranking.

There are some rules to follow, though, if you want to employ keyword-based slugs and improve your ecommerce SEO.

• Don't pack your content with keywords; doing so harms both SEO and readability.
• You can incorporate your other keywords into your writing by selecting a head keyword.
• Aim for long-tail keywords because they have a higher chance of matching search terms.
• Maintain keyword relevance: Don't choose keyword density over keyword precision.

The name of the product or category is frequently the keyword for a product or category page when it comes to SEO for ecommerce sites. Users can explore the website with ease as a result of this and grasp the URL.

Examine the search purpose of the keyword before selecting it for your URL slug. It's probably not the greatest option if the majority of the pages that rank for it are blogs whereas yours is a product page.

8. Slugs should stay green

Content that never becomes outdated and continues to be relevant to readers is known as evergreen content. The same idea is followed by an evergreen slug. Slugs should be kept evergreen by being cautious when adding dates or numerals and by shortening them as necessary.

When you use dates, your information can seem dated in the future, and figures might lose their validity. For landing pages for one-time events, mentioning a date or year might be acceptable.

In the event that you ever add to or edit the page, longer slugs that include too much descriptive content can become irrelevant. For this reason, some advise keeping with a broad target term, although the decision is completely yours. Your content and updating procedures will determine how it works.

For SEO and credibility reasons, updating your content is a crucial part of keeping your website current. The dates, numbers, or amount of information you provide (a how-to versus a comprehensive guide), if you frequently update blogs and product sites, may vary, and you will need to update the slug.

Prior to making a commitment, always take into account the possibility that you will later want to change the slug.

Is Changing a URL Slug Bad?

Yes, and you should try to stay away from it. Changing a URL after a launch is a challenging process that hurts your SEO. The page loses reputable links and search engine exposure, which has a detrimental effect on traffic. Evergreen slugs can shield slug SEO and eliminate the need for updates.

If a URL is altered, all internal and external links—as well as any bookmarks—must be located and updated. Another option is a 301 redirect.

If you don't do either, anyone who clicks on the outdated link will be taken to a 404 error page rather than your website's content.

A page title can be changed far more easily than a URL, so give your title more context while keeping URLs short.

9. Take Website Architecture Into Account

Slugs are distinguished by the fact that you can only use them once. The only exception is when a different URL path component, such as a category, is present.

It is therefore advisable to take into account a page's context within your website architecture to ensure that the appropriate slug is being utilized in the appropriate location. It wouldn't be a good idea to utilize a slug for a blog only to find out later that it would be the ideal slug for one of your items or product categories. We've already talked about how terrible it is to change a slug after the fact.

When choosing your slug, be sure to take your content marketing strategy, product lists, and landing pages into account. If it relates to a product, think about where it stands in relation to other products. Consider whether the blog is the cornerstone content or a part of a series if it is for a blog.

Mapping your e-commerce user flows can be useful if you haven't decided on a plan for the architecture of your website.

Make a URL strategy.

Optimizing your URL slugs is one of the SEO tactics that are necessary for e-commerce websites.

However, the slug isn't the only element of your URL that matters. Every component of the URL route aids visitors and search engines in understanding the content of pages and site navigation, while additional emphasis may be placed on the slug because each page needs its own.

You should have an overarching plan to refer to for this consistency and logic, and it should outline how you organize URLs for various pages of your e-commerce website.