What are the common mistakes to avoid when creating slugs for SEO?

When it comes to creating user-friendly URLs or "slugs" for your website pages, there are a few common risks you'll want to avoid for optimal SEO:

One mistake is using non-descriptive slugs that provide no context about the page content, like "/page1" or "/article123". Those unclear slugs are a missed SEO opportunity and confusing for users.

You also want to avoid keyword stuffing your slugs by using an excessive number of keywords. That comes across as spammy to search engines. But do try to naturally include a target keyword or two.

Watch out for including unnecessary words like "a", "the", "and" or stop words, as those just make the slug longer without adding value.

Using underscores or spaces for word separation can create encoding issues, so stick to using hyphens to separate words in your slugs.

Uppercase characters, special symbols, and accented letters should also be avoided as they can cause problems and accessibility issues.

Make sure to structure your slugs in a logical hierarchy that mirrors your website architecture and navigation. Flat slugs with no hierarchy are confusing.

Duplicate slugs for multiple pieces of content can create duplicate content problems, so each page needs a unique slug.

You'll also want to keep slugs reasonably short and descriptive - super-long slugs get shortened in search results.

And avoid including any dynamic parameters or session IDs in the slug as those can also lead to duplicate issues.

Following SEO best practices around using clean, static, descriptive, keyword-focused slugs with proper word and hierarchy separation will create much more user and search engine-friendly URLs.