The URL slug is another keyword-rich part of your website that can increase or decrease your search rankings. Every website should optimise its URL slug to help improve its search engine results (SERPs). Therefore, you must know why you're using a specific URL slug.
Slugs are URLs for Post Titles
A slug is a URL representing the title of a post on your site. Using slugs is essential because they're optimised (SEO) and help improve your website's ranking in search results.
The term "slug" originally referred to the file extension (.php) used by PHP code, but it now refers to any file containing information about its location.
For example,
if you have a directory-style archive on your site, the slug will be the anchor text for all the links to that post. In other cases, it may be used as the title tag on one or more pages.
The main reason we want to optimise our slugs is that search engines can better understand what our content is about and rank our content higher in their indexes.
The Slug is the Word that Identifies a Post on your Blog
The slug is the word that identifies a post on your blog. It's the topic of your seat and the name that appears in search results. A good rule of thumb is that the slug should be short and sweet, with no spaces between words or other characters.
You can use hyphens (-), underscores (_), dashes (-), etc., but make sure they don't break up words. So, for example, don't use "The SEO Post" as your slug — it's too long and doesn't appear well on search engines. Instead, try something like "the-SEO-post."
You can use all sorts of tricks to make your slugs better than they are now. For example, you could add a prefix or suffix to them (e.g., "the-SEO-post" or "the-seo-post_"). You could also add numbers.
But when it comes down to it, you should only change your slugs if you're redesigning your site or making other significant changes.
The slug is also a good indicator of how often a post has been viewed on your blog. If it's been considered frequently, it may be more newsworthy than other posts and will likely receive more attention from search engines.
When writing your first draft in WordPress, use the WordPress post editor to create a description for each new post. Then use the WordPress "Edit Post" link on the screen to publish your content to the site's front page.
Your URLs should be SEO optimised to rank for specific keywords. Suppose you have an article titled "SEO Optimisation". In that case, it makes sense for people looking for information about SEO optimisation to click on your URL (even if you don't have any articles about SEO optimisation).
Your Blog's URL Should Be your Slug
Your blog's URL should be your slug. Your blog's URL is what people type into their browsers to access your blog. It's the primary way they will find your content, and it should capture the keywords you want people to search for when they are looking for you.
Your slug also links to your site, so it must be unique and descriptive enough that people can easily remember it. The problem is this can be challenging if you're starting on WordPress, as few options are available for slugs in the default WordPress setup.
The Longer, the Better for SEO
The URL's central portion is usually the same as your website's full domain name. Your site's permalink structure (also known as a hierarchical link) between the two parts of your URL slug.
In this example, that would be the "http://" prefix preceding the individual link, post ID, and site name. The permalink structure can change depending on how you've set things up in your WordPress installation.
That's why we always recommend using long URLs for your blog posts and other content on your website — they're more likely to appear in search results than short ones because search engines have to crawl through more links to find them.
You can do Some Minor Magic with the _Bloginfo Parameter
You can do some minor magic with the _bloginfo parameter, but if you want to go deep, there are WordPress plugins for you. One of the best options for this is WP-SEO-Slug.
It will create a custom page for every post on your site that makes a slug for that post's URL. This means that each post will have its unique URL, and each page on your site will have a different URL too.
This solves two problems:
It helps with SEO because it provides more information about the page (like its title) in the URL. This makes it easier for search engines to understand what people are looking for when they type in that term and find your pages/posts with it in their search query.
It also helps with accessibility by providing more information about each page regarding how many posts fit into each category and how many pages fit into each category (i.e., on your homepage).
If you Want to go Deep
A URL slug is a unique identifier for your website in the path of your site's URL. It's like a web address but doesn't include a domain name or subdomain.
If you want to go deep, there are WordPress plugins for you and others that you can use to determine the slug on your own.
An excellent example of how an SEO consultant might use this information would be if you created an e-commerce website with several products with different prices and SKUs. An SKU is a stock-keeping unit, which means it's a unique identifier for each product on your site.
You would use a URL slug by creating different URLs for each product page on your site so visitors can easily find them when browsing. The best way to do this is by using relative paths in their URLs so that they don't have to remember any particular part of the path before being able to search for the page they're looking for.
Use the Slug as an Opportunity to Include Keywords
It would help if you changed your WordPress URL slug for several reasons. One is if you're not using the default "wp-blog-header" slug and want to use the default "main-navigation".
Another reason might be that you want to change the title of your post by adding a subhead or a subtitle. You can also use slugs as keywords for your posts. Use the slug to include keywords that make sense for your blog.
For example, if you're writing about health, it may make sense for your URL slug to include "health". If you have a lot of content on weight loss, perhaps it's wise to have an URL slug that provides for "weight loss".
A common mistake when creating a new WordPress site is using the same keyword for all pages (or sections) in your location. This will cause problems with search engines since they prefer to avoid duplicate indexing content. So instead of having "health" as a keyword for all pages on your site, try using other words like "weight loss", "fitness", etc.
Ensure your Long URL is Easy to Remember
This is a great tip to optimise your WordPress URL slug. The URL slug is how search engines like Google and Bing see your website. If you want to increase the chances of your site being found, ensure that the short URL you use for your posts is easy to remember and key in on some keyword phrases that describe your writing.
Here are a few other things you can do to make sure your long URL is easy to remember:
Make it human-readable. Try to make it simple by having fewer characters or spaces between words.
Please give it a catchy name that describes what it's about. For example, if you write about social media marketing, use "social marketing tips" instead of "link-building tips."
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