What are Slugs?
A slug is the part of a URL which identifies a particular page on a website in an easy to read form.
In other words, it’s the part of the URL that explains the page’s content. For example: https://locations.yourbusiness.com/mcdonalds-new-york - here mcdonalds-new-york becomes a slug, as that is the page you are redirecting the user to and this slug also identifies the purpose of the page - in this case store page for the Mcdonald's New York location.
Why are Slugs important to optimise your Pages?
Writing a good slug for your page or post can positively affect your SEO. It allows you to do the following things:
The main SEO benefit of a slug is that you can change the words to make sure that it has the words that you really want to rank for. It’s one of the indicators Google uses to determine what a page is about.
The URL is also one of the things that people see in the search results. Picture a results page: you’ll see many different URLs about a certain topic, right? So you need to make sure your slug is in line with what people expect to see. For example, our main article on WordPress SEO has the URL yoast.com/wordpress-seo, which is very on point. People are a lot more likely to click on that, than on yoast.com/?P=613458, even though that’s the URL that WordPress creates by default.