URL Slugs: The Small Detail That Affects SEO More Than You Think

A URL slug is the human-readable part of a URL that identifies a specific page: /how-to-bake-sourdough-bread/ . It looks simple. Getting it right involves understanding URL encoding, SEO best practices, Unicode normalization, and CMS-specific conventions. The rules A good slug follows these conventions: Lowercase only : URLs are case-sensitive. Page-Title and page-title are different URLs. Using lowercase prevents duplicate content from case variations. Hyphens, not underscores : Google treats hyphens as word separators and underscores as word joiners. web-development is two words for SEO. web_development is one word. No special characters : Remove or transliterate non-ASCII characters. Replace spaces with hyphens. Remove punctuation. No stop words : "a", "the", "is", "of", "and" can often be removed. /the-best-way-to-learn-javascript/ becomes /best-way-learn-javascript/ . This is debatable. Some SEOs keep stop words for readability. Short but descriptive : 3-5 words is ideal. /how-to-