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When you are just starting to do SEO, Slug is probably a word that is too familiar and always mentioned. But what is the information about Slug or what is WordPress Slug? It is a relatively vague and incomplete concept. Therefore, how to implement and optimize well and effectively for SEO is still the question you want to find the answer to.

However, the current article about slugs is too general or too advanced. Feeling bored in the process of improving your SEO skills? No problem! Because?

In this article, I will help you better understand what a slug is, how to set it up in a WordPress website. And many tips to help you optimize Slug user-friendly and SEO standard. Get started now!

What are slugs?

In WordPress, the slug is the editable part of the URL, placed after the domain name, at the end of the URL, and after the “/”. The WordPress slug is an important part of the URL that is combined together to form a Permalink that leads to a website..

What are WordPress Slugs?

Slug is used to uniquely identify a specific page on a website. It is in a format that can be read by both users and search engines and is also part of the URL that explains the content of the page.

Why is Slug in SEO important?

What is slug that is so important? Slug is one of the signals taken into account by Google and other engines when ranking a website. Easy-to-read slugs help users identify a page's content. And tell the user exactly what kind of information to find on that page.

Slug optimization will give you an edge in SEO and increase usability for users (eg easy to remember, easy to read, easy to understand,…). In addition, Slug optimization also contributes to making URLs more SEO-friendly such as:

• Keywords in the URL: You can change or separate the words in there to make sure there are words that you really want to rank for. It's one of the metrics Google uses to determine the content of a page.
• Create user-friendly URLs: A URL is one of the things people see in search results. Visualize the results page, you will see many different URLs on a certain topic. So you need to make sure that the Slug matches what people expect.

How to Set Slug in WordPress

Before creating a Slug, we need to know 2 basic rules:

• Convert spaces to dashes
• Use only lowercase letters.

The Slug creation function in WordPress automatically applies this rule, but when installing Slugs manually, you need to follow it.

How to set slug in wordpress

How to set Post Slug in WordPress

Set the WordPress Slug for a WordPress post whenever creating or editing a post. If you're writing a new post, be sure to save it as a draft first. Click on the Title box, you will see a box containing the URL Permalink with the Edit icon.

The box containing the Permalink URL has an Edit icon.

When you click Edit, you will be able to edit the Slug part of the URL.

Click on the edit section to edit the Slug

When done, click Save and Publish or Update the post. Remember that Google likes clean, organized, and structured WordPress sites; This includes the use of short URLs and or Slugs.

They can also help improve your CTR. MarketingSherpa did a new study. They found that users are 250% more likely to click on an organic list if:

• There is a short Slug
• Appears right below the list with the Long Slug

Therefore, keep the Slug as short as possible. One thing to keep in mind is this: WordPress automatically generates a slug for you based on the title.

How to set Page Slug WordPress

Just like with a post, you can set the WordPress Slug by finding the Permalink URL and clicking Edit:

Click Save or Update when done

Enter the Slug you want, click Save and Publish or Update.

How to change Category or Tag Slug

When you create a new Category or Tag from within the WordPress Editor. WordPress will automatically assign that item what a wordpress Slug is without any input from you.

But if you want to manually set the Slug for a Category or Tag, it is possible to go back and change the Slug. The process is essentially identical for both Category and Tag.

Go to Post → Categories or Post → Tags. Then, find the category or tag you want to edit, hover over it and click the Edit button.

Find the category or tag you want to edit in WordPress

Enter your desired Slug in the box and click Update at the bottom of the page:

Change categories or stag slug then update

By default, the author Slug for an Author's archive page is their username. Unfortunately, you cannot change the username of a WordPress account once it is created. But what we can do is to use a free plugin to change the Author Slug.

After activating the plugin, you will get a new Edit Author Slug on the user's profile page. It allows to change the author's archive handler.

3 Most Effective Ways to Optimize WordPress Slugs

If in the process of optimizing Slug URL you feel like an overwhelming task. Now, with the following three tips will help you easily apply to help the page stand out.

Method 1. Avoid keyword stuffing

First, it's important that you avoid “keyword stuffing”. This involves using too many similar terms to try to improve your rankings. However, it tends to make the URLs look unnatural:

Avoid stuffing too many keywords in Slug

Keyword stuffing can harm a website by damaging its reputation and reducing the amount of traffic it receives. It can even lead to Google penalties. At the same time, stuffing a key slug like what a slug is will cause distrust of potential customers and lead to reduced conversions.

To overcome this situation, you can use a tool to shorten the link:

Link Shortener for Slug

Method 2. Keep Slug Short

It is important to keep Slugs as short as possible by using a minimum word count to describe your page. Short URLs are easier to read and remember, which makes the link more appealing to potential visitors.

Also, a short URL is useful when sharing redirect links on social networking sites. Like Twitter has a fixed 280 character limit. When it doesn't take up space on a site address. You'll have more room for meaningful content and hashtags.

With Pretty Links, you can create Slugs that are just one character in length:

Create a 1-character Slug with Pretty Links

To easily create these short links. You can use the Pretty Links Quick Add Tool from the WordPress dashboard.

Method 3. Include relevant and important keywords

The best terms for using Slug in SEO can be discovered through effective keyword research. This process allows you to see metrics like: Search volume for words and phrases in the major search engines.

That way, you'll know which keywords are popular and relevant to your target audience. You can then easily incorporate them into your Slug using Pretty Links.

It is important to use, separate the right keywords in the shortened URLs. As this will grab the attention of your target audience and inspire them to click through. On the other hand, using confusing, unrelated, vague terms can harm conversions.

How to fix the same Slug WordPress

In case the page cannot be found, we can fix it by:

• Delete post
• Rename tag
• Change the path of WordPress.

In addition, users can use the method of blocking Google index or forwarding subpages to a main page.

Remove Slug of SubFolder on WordPress

Go to Advanced and select Permalinks. In the “Change URLs” section, in the “Strip the category base (usually/category/) from the category URL” section, click “Remove”.

After editing, scroll to the bottom of the page and click “Save” to update all changes. So you have created what is Slug in WordPress.

Conclude

In short, it can be affirmed that Slug is an integral part of the URL, and plays an extremely important role in SEO. Therefore, when creating a Slug, you need to have a method to optimize it so that it is easiest to reach users and bring good results to your WordPress site.

Now you know what Slug is! It is the words behind the domain name, combined with the domain name to form a complete static link. Slug optimization for: Each article, each web page, each category, each tag is necessary if you want to rank better on search engines and be more reader-friendly.

I hope this post has been of help to you during your Slug setup phase.

Good luck!

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