Components: URL Slug

Guides creation of SEO-friendly URL slugs for blog posts, articles, and content pages. Research on 11.8M Google results shows shorter URLs tend to rank higher; position #1 URLs average 50–60 characters.

When invoking

On

first use

, if helpful, open with 1–2 sentences on what this skill covers, then provide the main output. On

subsequent use

or when the user asks to skip, go directly to the main output.

Scope

URL slug

The path segment after the base (e.g.,

ai-people-search

in

/blog/ai-people-search

)

Applies to

Blog posts, articles, guides, category pages, product pages

Best Practices

Length

Guideline

Target

Slug length

Under 60 characters total (including path prefix)

Word count

3–5 words

Principle

Shorter = easier to read, share, remember; less truncation in SERPs; see

serp-features

Example

"The Complete Guide to AI Search Engine for Finding People" →

ai-people-search

(3 words) or

ai-search-finding-people

(4 words), not

ai-search-engine-finding-people-speed-discovery-outreach

(9 words, 51 chars).

Format

Rule

Do

Avoid

Separators

Hyphens (

-

)

Underscores (

_

), spaces, periods

Case

Lowercase only

Mixed case (causes duplicate content)

Characters

Letters (a-z), numbers (0-9), hyphens

Special chars

Stop words

Remove when possible: the, a, and, or, to

Keep when needed: "how-to"

Content

Rule

Guideline

Primary keyword

Include near start; one focus per URL

Descriptive

Clear what page is about from slug alone

No keyword stuffing

One keyword mention is enough

No dates

Omit unless time-specific (news, annual roundups)

Non-ASCII Characters

Scenario

Rule

Accented letters

Convert to ASCII: é→e, ü→u, ñ→n, ç→c

Non-Latin scripts

Use UTF-8 percent-encoding if required; prefer ASCII for compatibility

Example

jalapeno

not

jalapeño

;

cafe

not

café

Common Mistakes

Copy-pasting full title

Summarize instead — long title → short slug

Auto-generated IDs

:

/post/12847

— always customize

Tracking params in slug

UTM, session IDs — use query params separately

Changing without redirect

Always 301 from old to new slug Slug Generation Workflow Extract primary keyword from title or target keyword Summarize in 3–5 words (don't copy full title) Remove stop words (the, a, and, or) unless needed for readability Lowercase, hyphenate , validate length < 60 chars Check uniqueness — no duplicate slugs site-wide Examples Title / Topic ❌ Too long ✅ Recommended AI Search Engine for Finding People: Speed vs. Discovery ai-search-engine-finding-people-speed-discovery-outreach ai-people-search or ai-search-finding-people The Ultimate SEO Checklist for 2025 the-ultimate-seo-checklist-for-2025 seo-checklist-2025 How to Increase Website Traffic how-to-increase-the-traffic-to-your-website increase-website-traffic Best Running Shoes for Marathon Training best-running-shoes-for-marathon-training-in-2025 best-running-shoes-2025 Output Format When creating or auditing a slug: Recommended slug (3–5 words) Character count (slug only) Primary keyword included Alternatives if multiple valid options Reference : Alignify URL optimization