Best Practices for Creating High-Ranking SEO URL Slugs
A URL slug is one of the most critical on-page ranking factors and trust signals for search engines. When users see a clean URL like word-counter.tech/url-slug-generator, they immediately know what the page offers before even clicking.
In contrast, messy URLs containing special symbols (%20, ?id=9812) or weird punctuation confuse search engine spiders, look spammy on social media, and drastically decrease click-through rates.
Hyphens vs. Underscores in URLs: What Google Says
According to Google Search Central documentation, you should always use hyphens (-) rather than underscores (_) to separate words in URLs:
my-awesome-post— Read by Google as 3 distinct words: "my", "awesome", "post".my_awesome_post— Read by search algorithms as a single unbroken word: "my_awesome_post".
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
How long should an optimal URL slug be?
Best practice is to keep slugs between 3 to 5 words (under 60–75 characters). Shorter URLs are easier to copy, share on social networks, and won't get cut off in mobile search engine result pages.
What happens to foreign accents and diacritics?
Our tool automatically normalizes Unicode characters via NFD decomposition, safely converting letters like é, à, ü, ñ, ç into their standard ASCII counterparts (e, a, u, n, c) to ensure total browser compatibility.