SEO-Friendly URL Slugs: The Complete Guide

Your URL slug is one of the first things a searcher sees and one of the easiest things to get right.

What makes a good slug

• Lowercase letters, numbers and hyphens only.
• Three to five meaningful words.
• Contains the main topic of the page.
• No dates unless the content is genuinely time-bound.

Hyphens vs underscores

Google treats hyphens as word separators but historically treated underscores as joiners. Use hyphens.

Should you remove stop words?

Removing words like "the" and "of" usually makes slugs shorter and cleaner, but keep them when they change meaning.

Changing existing slugs

Only change a published slug when you have a strong reason, and always add a 301 redirect from the old URL so you keep links and rankings.

Wrap up

Use a slug generator to keep your URLs consistent across your whole site.