How to Create an SEO-Friendly URL Slug (Free Tool)

An SEO-friendly URL slug is the short, readable part at the end of a URL that says what the page is about: lowercase words, separated by hyphens, with no punctuation, dates or filler. To make one, paste your title into our free slug generator, then cut it down to the 3 to 6 words someone would actually search for. how-to-check-meta-tags is a good slug. Post_ID=4827&ref=home is not.

The generator is free and needs no account to start. Guests get 5 tool uses a day, and a free My Botsy account (100% free, no spam) removes that daily cap. Every example below was run through our tools on October 30, 2026, and re-run after that day's update to the generator, which now drops apostrophes and quotes cleanly and removes accents from Latin letters.

What makes a slug SEO-friendly

Google's own URL structure best practices page in Search Central is short and specific. Pulled together with what we've learned publishing in six languages, a good slug follows these rules:

• Descriptive words, not IDs. Google recommends readable words over long ID numbers. A reader who sees /blog/how-to-check-dns-records in a search result or a chat message knows what they'll get before clicking.
• Hyphens between words, not underscores. Google says this explicitly: hyphens signal a word boundary, while underscores are commonly read as joining a concept together (like format_date in code). Words run together, like greendress, are also discouraged.
• Lowercase only. URLs are case-sensitive, so /Coffee-Guide and /coffee-guide can be two different pages. Lowercasing everything avoids duplicates and broken links when someone types the URL by hand.
• Your audience's language. Google advises using the words your readers search with, in their language, and transliterated if that's how they search. More on accents and non-Latin scripts below.
• Short and stable. There's no official character limit, but shorter slugs are easier to read, share and remember, and they're less likely to need changing later. Changing a slug means setting up a redirect, so get it right before you publish.

How to create an SEO-friendly URL slug, step by step

1. Start from the search phrase, not the headline. Your title can be catchy; your slug should match what people type. For a post titled Don't Buy a Laptop in 2026 Until You Read This: 7 Tips & Tricks!, the phrase people search is closer to laptop buying tips.
2. Paste the title or phrase into the slug generator and press Submit. It lowercases the text, removes accents from Latin letters (é becomes e), drops apostrophes inside words, swaps spaces and other punctuation for single hyphens, and trims hyphens from both ends.
3. Remove filler words such as a, the, in, until and you, unless removing them changes the meaning. how-to is worth keeping when the search phrase starts with it.
4. Drop dates and numbers that will go stale. A year or a list count (7 tips) in the slug forces a URL change the next time you update the post.
5. Check special characters (apostrophes, quotes, accents and non-Latin letters) using the sections below.
6. Check the length. Paste the final slug into the character counter. Most good slugs land between about 20 and 60 characters.
7. Publish, then never change it casually. If you must rename a live slug, add a 301 redirect from the old URL and test it.

Worked examples (real tool output)

Example 1: a clickbait headline

Input: Don't Buy a Laptop in 2026 Until You Read This: 7 Tips & Tricks!

Slug generator output: dont-buy-a-laptop-in-2026-until-you-read-this-7-tips-tricks

The apostrophe in Don't was dropped, so the word stays whole as dont instead of splitting into don-t. (Before the October 30 update the generator turned it into don-39-t, because the site's input cleaning had already changed the apostrophe into the HTML code '. That's fixed.) The real problem now is length: 59 characters of mostly filler. The edited slug we'd publish is laptop-buying-tips: 18 characters, matching the search phrase, and still true after the next update.

Example 2: underscores, a dash and brackets

Input: 10 Best SEO_Tools for 2026 — Free & Paid (Updated)

Output: 10-best-seo-tools-for-2026-free-paid-updated

The underscore, the em dash, the ampersand and the brackets all became single hyphens, which is what you want. Now edit: 10, 2026 and updated will all be wrong within a year. best-seo-tools or free-seo-tools is the slug to keep, depending on which phrase the page really targets.

Example 3: double quotes

Input: The "Best" Running Shoes for Flat Feet

Output: the-best-running-shoes-for-flat-feet

Straight double quotes simply disappear, like any other punctuation. (They used to come out as -34- before the October 30 fix, for the same reason apostrophes came out as -39-.) Curly quotes and French guillemets behave the same way. The slug to publish: running-shoes-for-flat-feet.

Accents and non-English slugs

Our generator removes accents from Latin letters and keeps every other alphabet as it is. We tested three languages:

• Spanish: Café con leche: ¿cómo prepararlo en casa? gave cafe-con-leche-como-prepararlo-en-casa
• German: Über uns: Größe & Preise für Straßenfeste gave uber-uns-grosse-preise-fur-strassenfeste (ß becomes ss)
• Hindi: घर पर कॉफी कैसे बनाएं gave घर-पर-कॉफी-कैसे-बनाएं

Accented letters would be fine for Google, which shows examples like /gemüse and Japanese words in its own guidance. The catch is what happens on the wire, and it's why the generator strips Latin accents. Non-ASCII characters are sent percent-encoded, and that's how the URL looks when it's pasted into many emails, chat apps and spreadsheets. Run through PHP's urlencode (the same function our URL encoder uses):

• an accented café-con-leche-cómo-prepararlo-en-casa would become caf%C3%A9-con-leche-c%C3%B3mo-prepararlo-en-casa (48 characters), while the generator's cafe-con-leche-como-prepararlo-en-casa stays at 38
• a German slug with umlauts, über-uns-größe-preise-für-straßenfeste, would become %C3%BCber-uns-gr%C3%B6%C3%9Fe-preise-f%C3%BCr-stra%C3%9Fenfeste (63 characters)
• the 21-character Hindi slug becomes 157 characters of %E0%A4... codes.

So for Spanish, Portuguese and French the generator's accent-free result is usually what you want. German sites often prefer ueber, groesse and strassenfeste; the generator writes uber and grosse, so add the e by hand if that's your house style. For Hindi, Arabic, Chinese and other non-Latin scripts, a native-script slug matches how people search but looks long once encoded; many sites use a short transliterated or English slug instead. Whichever you pick, use it consistently across the site. To read an encoded URL someone sent you, paste it into the URL decoder.

Don't confuse slugs with domain names. Accented domains use Punycode (xn--), which our IDN Punycode converter handles. The path after the domain uses percent-encoding instead.

Common slug mistakes

• Letting the CMS keep the full headline. WordPress, Shopify and most blog platforms build the slug from the title automatically. Open the slug or permalink field and edit it before you hit Publish.
• Keyword stuffing. seo-tools-best-seo-tools-free-seo reads like spam to people and adds nothing for search engines. Use the phrase once.
• Changing a slug after it ranks without a redirect. Old links, bookmarks and search results then hit a 404. Add a 301 and confirm it with the URL redirect checker; our guide on checking whether a redirect is 301 or 302 shows what a correct result looks like.
• Mixed case. If your server treats /About and /about as the same page, Google may still see two URLs. Stick to lowercase; the case converter fixes a whole list of URLs at once.
• Tracking parameters in internal links. ?utm_source= belongs on links from other sites and campaigns, not in your slug or your internal navigation. See our UTM parameters guide.
• Slug and title telling different stories. If the slug says laptop-buying-tips but the title and meta description talk about tablets, fix the page. The meta tags checker and our meta tags guide help you check the rest of the page's search snippet.

Check a slug inside a full URL

When a URL carries a long query string, it's easy to miss which part is the slug. The URL parser splits a URL into scheme, host, port, path, query and fragment (the part after #), and lists each query parameter separately, so you can see the path on its own and spot stray parameters such as session IDs, which Google recommends keeping out of URLs. It shows the path percent-encoded, which is also a quick way to see how an accented slug travels.

Make your next slug

Paste your title into the slug generator, cut the result down to the search phrase, and check its length with the character counter. All of these tools are free, and you don't need an account to start.

Frequently asked questions

What is a URL slug?

The slug is the last part of a URL path that identifies the page in readable words. In mybotsy.com/blog/how-to-check-dns-records, the slug is how-to-check-dns-records.

Should I use hyphens or underscores in a URL?

Hyphens. Google recommends hyphens to separate words because they clearly mark a word boundary, while underscores are often read as joining words into one concept.

How long should a URL slug be?

There's no official limit. Aim for the 3 to 6 words of the main search phrase, usually about 20 to 60 characters, and drop filler words, dates and list counts that will go out of date.

Can a URL slug contain accents or non-English letters?

Yes. Google supports words in your audience's language, including accented and non-Latin letters. They're sent percent-encoded, so they can look long when pasted. Many sites remove accents in Latin-script languages to keep links readable, and our slug generator does that for you.

Is it bad for SEO to change a slug?

Changing it without a redirect is. Old links will return 404 errors. If you must rename a slug, add a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one and test that it returns 301.

Is the My Botsy slug generator free?

Yes. It's free and works in any browser. Guests get 5 tool uses a day with no account, and a free My Botsy account, with no spam, removes that daily cap.