Free URL Slug Generator

Google explicitly treats hyphens as word separators and underscores as word joiners. A slug like seo_cost_guide reads to the engine as one token, while seo-cost-guide reads as three words it can match against queries. Every major CMS defaults to hyphens for this reason — there's no situation where underscores in a slug are the better choice.

Three to five words, and well under 80 characters. Short slugs are easier to read in search results, get truncated less in shares and citations, and force you to keep only the words that matter. This tool caps Latin-script slugs at 80 characters and Chinese slugs at 30 characters, which keeps the encoded URL comfortably under common limits.

Usually drop them. 'how-to-write-a-meta-description' works fine as 'write-meta-description' — shorter, same meaning, same keywords. Keep a stop word only when removing it changes the meaning or makes the slug read wrong. Engines don't penalize stop words; they just waste characters you could spend on real words.

You can, but every change needs a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one, or you lose the links, rankings, and AI citations the old URL accumulated. That's why it pays to get the slug right before you hit publish. If you must change one, set the redirect in the same deploy and update your internal links to point at the new URL directly.

It depends on the script. For Latin-based languages (Spanish, French, German, Portuguese), transliterate accents to plain ASCII — ó becomes o, ü becomes u — so the slug works everywhere. For Chinese, keep native characters: browsers render them correctly, they're far shorter than pinyin, and they're readable to the audience actually clicking the link. This tool routes by language automatically.