What Is A Slug In SEO?

The goal of a website is to provide the most information about itself to anyone who comes upon it. People will naturally want to discover as much about your website as possible. Most people will know that a “URL” is a form of an address on the World Wide Web, but they may not have an idea of what it refers to in this context. Slug is a short and memorable name for a page. It not only directs website visitors but also helps search engines discover your site.

Importance of Slug in Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a process of tweaking your website so that it ranks higher and is displayed more prominently on search engine results pages (SERPs). The goal of this process is to inform people about your website, build traffic and generate more sales. Slug is also known as “URL” or “web address” in SEO. Googles, Bing, etc use the search term entered by the users to find suitable content related to the phrase. So, if you want to rank higher on search engines then you need to add relevant keywords in the slug or URL. Every search engine has different rules and algorithms. The first thing that should be fixed is the URL. If a visitor lands on your site and you have sloppy, often misspelled, and hard-to-remember URLs this will frustrate him or her.
For instance, you might use something like “slug-example.com” instead of “example.com”, or even worse, “example” instead of “slug”. A standard rule for a website is the web address should be unique to the specific page within one domain (Examples: phone numbers must be unique for each phone book so Google can distinguish between people who are looking for a person with the same name.

Read our Blog : What is SEO and how it works ?

Slug helps in making your website more search engine friendly.

A 301 redirect is a website redirect that informs the search engines that a page has moved permanently to a new web address. The search engines will update their records to reflect the moved page, keeping your site and its accumulated link juice intact. A properly configured 301 redirect will trigger a Google re-crawl of the redirected URL which can help the new pages get indexed and ranked much faster.
Also, it is an effective way of ensuring that external links remain active and don’t point to expired URLs or ones with undesirable content.

Easy steps to make and edit slug in WordPress

1. After installing the WordPress blog site on your server then Visit the dashboard
2. Go to Settings>>SEO and set the Slug as follow:
3. Now you have to go to Appearance>>Tags and re-deploy the slider on the front end of every post or page that you want to edit in the slug.
4. Enter this code in your header.php file
   ?head=title
   &head=meta_description
   &head=meta_keywords
   &head=copyright
   echo “” . esc_attr($blog_title) . “”;
5. The final step is still slug and you have to go to the page content section and enter this code with your prefix tag in your editor.
   ?slug=
   ?blog_title=
6. Now save it and enable it again. Now you can see the changes in your blog pages.
   If you have any questions please ask us in the comment box.

Easy steps to make and edit slug in Shopify

1. Creating a new store in order to create the store you have to enter your name and email on Shopify’s official site. Then signup by verifying your email address.
2. After creating an account, you need to visit the dashboard of your Shopify store.
3. Go to the products section and click on add product button on your dashboard page. A pop-up will open and here you have to fill up the required information such as product name, price, stock, etc just like a normal E-commerce site.
4. Click on the Save button at last so that it can be saved up to your Shopify store’s database.
5. Now you are at the next step and you have to go to the Edit product page of your store. This is the place where you need to edit the Slug that is present at the front end of your shop.
6. Now enter your slug in the text box and click on the update button.
7. Now because of this now you can see your products whenever someone will search for them online for example Google, Bing, etc.
8. To customize your shop with some extra details like color, font, etc, head to the Shopify themes section.
9. You can find many great themes from here that suits perfectly your store’s appearance.

Conclusion: You can create or edit a slug in your own way that you think is perfect for you. Hope this article  What is a slug in SEO will be useful for you. Enjoy it!