From headline to clean URL in one paste
A slug is the human part of a URL — the /keyword-density-guide/ after the domain — and it's read by more judges than you'd think: searchers deciding whether a result looks trustworthy, browsers autocompleting addresses, link-sharers whose pasted URLs either look professional or look like /p=4413&ref=xK9. Hand-writing slugs invites inconsistency (spaces, capitals, Turkish ı, stray punctuation); this generator converts any title — or a whole list of them — into clean, lowercase, hyphenated, ASCII-safe slugs instantly as you type.
How to generate slugs
- Paste titles into the box, one per line — bulk lists are the point.
- Choose your separator: hyphens (the SEO standard) or underscores (for code identifiers).
- Optionally strip stop words (a, the, in…) for shorter slugs.
- Copy the results — one finished slug per line, in input order.
What “clean” means, technically
The transformation pipeline: characters with accents and diacritics are transliterated to ASCII cousins (é→e, ü→u, and proper Turkish handling: ı→i, ş→s, ğ→g, ç→c, ö→o); everything is lowercased (URLs are case-sensitive on most servers — /About and /about can be different pages, a duplicate-content trap); punctuation and symbols dissolve; and runs of spaces become single separators with no leading/trailing strays. The result survives every browser, CMS, CDN and copy-paste round-trip without percent-encoding ugliness like %C3%BC.
Slug strategy for SEO
- Keep the keywords, lose the filler: “10 Best Coffee Shops in Istanbul (2026 Guide!)” wants to be
best-coffee-shops-istanbul— the stop-word option does this mechanically. - 3–5 words is the sweet spot: descriptive enough to preview the content, short enough to read in a results page.
- Hyphens, not underscores, for public URLs: search engines treat hyphens as word separators; underscores historically glue words together.
- Omit dates and numbers you'll regret:
/guide-2024/looks stale in 2026; evergreen slugs let you update content without breaking the URL. - Never change a published slug casually — existing links break. If you must, 301-redirect the old address.
Beyond URLs
The same sanitisation serves anywhere “title-like text must become identifier-safe”: file names for uploads, anchor IDs, image alt-file pairs, database keys, campaign names for our UTM Builder (which shares the lowercase-no-spaces religion). Bulk mode shines during migrations: paste 200 article titles, get 200 consistent slugs, import.
Type a headline, read a URL — the smallest piece of SEO housekeeping, automated to zero effort.
Quick reference
| Property | Detail |
|---|---|
| Input | Titles — single or bulk (one per line) |
| Transformations | lowercase, transliterate accents/Turkish, strip punctuation |
| Separators | Hyphen (SEO standard) or underscore |
| Stop words | Optional removal for shorter slugs |
| Live output | Updates as you type, order preserved |
| Ideal length | 3–5 meaningful words |
| Cost | Free, unlimited |
Frequently asked questions
Hyphens or underscores — which is better for SEO?
Hyphens. Search engines parse best-coffee-shops as three words; best_coffee_shops has historically been read as one token. Underscores belong in code identifiers, not public URLs.
How does the tool handle Turkish and accented characters?
They're transliterated to ASCII equivalents — ş→s, ğ→g, ı→i, ü→u, é→e and so on — so the slug never turns into %C3%9F soup when copied. Meaning stays readable; encoding problems disappear.
Should I remove stop words from my slugs?
Usually yes — /how-to-train-a-dog/ and /train-dog/ rank identically, and shorter reads better in results. Keep a stop word only when removing it creates ambiguity (“to-be-or-not-to-be”).
Can I change the slug of an already-published page?
Only with a 301 redirect from the old URL — otherwise every existing link and bookmark 404s, and accumulated ranking signals are orphaned. For new content, get the slug right here, first.