If you were to describe your page in a few words and replace the spaces with hyphens, that would usually be “good enough” for SEO. But you’d probably prefer not to take a stab in the dark.

Hi, I’m Cally, from the International Institute of Digital Marketing. Let’s run through a simple process for creating optimized URL slugs.

1. Remove special characters

Have you ever seen a URL with backslashes () or square brackets ([])? Probably not, because these are unsafe characters that don’t belong in URLs.

You should remove these for obvious reasons, but it’s also best practice to remove other special characters like commas, colons, semicolons, etc.

2. Remove superfluous information

Google says it’s good practice to make URLs as simple as possible.

So remove anything you don’t need from our potential URL.

Note that you’ll have to use common sense for this part. The aim is not to make your URL so short that it no longer accurately describes its content. It’s to remove unnecessary words and phrases.

3. Boil it down to a keyword

Most titles naturally contain keywords, so what you’re probably left with at this stage is a simplified, keyword-rich version of your title.

This can lead to long URLs that get truncated in search results. The additional context can also be an issue should you ever want to update the page.

So, the next step is to find the keyword that represents the most popular way people search for your page’s topic.

4. Make it lowercase

Most web servers treat lower and uppercase URLs the same, but this isn’t always the case. Technically, everything after the hostname (domain) in a URL is case-sensitive, and some servers will treat them differently.

To be on the safe side and to avoid potential duplicate content issues, use lowercase URLs—always.

For more information, visit www.iidm.world