Website what is a slug

It should be noted that the word slug emerged from the WordPress community. You can configure your slug under Permalink Settings. This is not SEO or user friendly, so the first thing you need to do is to configure WordPress to use the post name as the slug instead of serial numbers. The best approach is to select the Post Name so that your post slugs will include the post name separated by dashes.

That was a great first step but there is one more step to make sure that your slugs are optimized for SEO. When you create a new post or edit an existing one , WordPress allows you to edit the slug of a page or post. As you can see in the screenshot below, there is an EDIT button next to the permalink of each page. When you click EDIT, you can make changes to the slug and optimize for both users and search engines, using the guidelines below.

Note: Optimizing the slug is not a task for WordPress users only. You should try and optimize your slugs on other platforms as well.

Help Google and other search engines understand for which keywords you want to rank for the particular page or post, by including those keywords in the page slug. This is shorter, easier to understand by users and gives search engines a big clue on the content of the page and the keywords you want to rank for. As part of the optimization process, you should consider removing stop words from your slugs.

If you take another look at the above example, you will notice that I have removed these to make my slug cleaner and shorter. Shorter slugs are easier to understand and faster to process than longer slugs. Another reason for keeping your slugs short and without stop keywords is the fact that search engines during the crawling and indexing process, are trying to match what the user has typed in the search box with page slugs.

However, longer or un-optimized links may prevent people from clicking through, as they can appear untrustworthy. These URLs also tend to lack descriptive information about the contents of the link, which can negatively affect your search engine rankings. You can avoid these problems by customizing your URL slugs, which are the descriptive sections found at the very end of your links.

Optimized slugs look neater, and are often better at attracting attention from your audience. A slug is the part that comes at the very end of a URL, and it refers to a specific page or post. Keeping your slugs concise and descriptive is beneficial in many ways.

For example, an optimized slug can:. The slug is one of the most important parts of your pretty link. That's why it's so important that you know how to use them effectively. Often, you'll find that the default slugs added to your links aren't very effective. For that reason, you may want to optimize your links by changing their slugs to something shorter and more descriptive.

With Pretty Links — a link shortener plugin offering a wide variety of useful features — you can do just that. Before you add a customized slug, there are a few other choices to make. Finally, enter your custom slug in the Pretty Link field. When you save your changes, your new link will be good to go! Of course, what you enter here will depend on the purpose of the link. So before we wrap up, let's look at a few tips for creating slugs that fit your purposes.

By following these two tips, you can ensure that your slugs are as effective as possible. This means that you can have a post that uses the same title and therefore the same slug as a page, but the permalink for each will be unique. For both posts and pages, you can edit the slug by selecting More Options from the menu to the right of your editor.

By selecting the slug portion of the permalink, you can enter your own custom slug for that page. Creating custom slugs is a great idea if your post or page title is especially long, or if its permalink would be difficult to remember. Having a good slug can also help you rank higher in search engine results, as Moz explains. Whether you need a landing page or a full ecommerce site, an online learning academy or an interactive informational site for your business, we can build it for you.

More by Jonathan Bossenger. Skip to content. In this article A quick history of slugs How a slug is generated Slugs and permalinks Customizing your slugs. Share this: Twitter Facebook. Like this: Like Loading Let our experts build your custom WordPress.

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