URL slug
Also called: slug, post slug
A URL slug is the human-readable part of a web address that identifies a specific page, usually the segment after the domain and any subfolders (for example, "url-slug" in seobro.com/glossary/url-slug). It is normally generated from the page title and can be edited.
The slug is the editable tail end of a URL, distinct from the full permalink (the whole address). Most content systems auto-generate it from the page title by lowercasing it, stripping punctuation, and joining words with hyphens, so “My Awesome Article” becomes my-awesome-article.
Why the words matter
Google’s URL guidance is direct: “use readable words rather than long ID numbers,” and “use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) to separate words.” Google treats a hyphen as a word break, so red-shoes reads as two words, while red_shoes can read as one joined term. A slug like /index.php?p=42 tells a person and a crawler nothing about the page; /mens-running-shoes tells both.
Conventions most practitioners follow:
- Keep it short and focused on the page’s main topic or target keyword.
- Lowercase only, hyphen-separated, no spaces or special characters.
- Drop filler words (“a”, “the”, “of”) when they add nothing.
- Avoid dates or volatile IDs you may later want to change.
Changing a slug changes the URL, so pair it with a 301 redirect from the old address (WordPress creates this automatically) to keep existing links, bookmarks, and rankings intact.
How it affects your traffic
Slugs are one of the cheapest on-page signals to get right, but retrofitting them across a site without redirects can quietly wipe out rankings. Descriptive, keyword-aligned slugs help users and crawlers understand a page before they open it, which supports click-through from the search results. Our On-Page SEO service audits URL structure alongside titles, headings, and internal links, and handles the 301 mapping so a slug cleanup keeps the equity you already earned.
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