How do you make an SEO friendly slug on your website?
To make URLs SEO-friendly, they need to be short and concise, the fewer words the better — but make sure that your primary target keywords for that article are included. The title of your posts and pages should be reflected in the slug, but not word for word — only the most important keywords.
Why are short slugs better than long slugs for SEO?
Because short slugs are quicker to crawl, index, and match to the search terms people use in the search box on search engines like Google.
When users use the search box on Google.com, the search engines’ job is to find content that matches what they search for as closely as possible. They do this by comparing the primary keywords users use with the words in your slug (among other things, SEO is not a 1-variable topic).
Example
Let’s say you have an article with this title:
5 Simple Site-Speed Tips to Make a Slow WordPress Site Lightning Fast
The golden nuggets (keywords) in that title are:
- Site-Speed
- Slow
- Make
- WordPress
- Fast
Because on average those keywords will be the most used search terms,for users who want to make their WordPress site faster. But exactly how users will use those primary keywords in a search query will vary from person to person.
Here’s just a small handful of real-life ways people search for WordPress speed optimization (taken directly from Google):
how to make my wordpress site fasterwhy is my wordpress site so slowhow can I improve my wordpress speed performance
Do you recognize the common denominators? Speed, slow, make, WordPress, Fast. These keywords are the ones you should put in your slug.
Here’s how I would make a slug out for that type of article:
yourwebsite.com/site-speed-make-slow-wordpress-fast
Try reading that slug a couple of times:
site-speed-make-slow-wordpress-fastYes, it reads weird, and is grammatically off, because all the filler words are gone — you wouldn’t write a title like that. But for slugs, it’s great because it contains all the important information for search engines.
Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it does make sense to use “how-to” or “quick tips” in your slugs because those terms are pretty commonly used in search queries. But let’s say you have a long article title with 10+ words in it, chances are that “how-to” or “5 tips” is not the most important part. Remember, slugs should be short, concise, and use only the most important terms (primary keywords).
