In this day and age, when the world has majorly moved to the comfort of the screens, be it the computer or smart devices, internet has become indispensable for anyone having access to such devices. From research to business transactions to entertainment- everything is possible over the internet. But with the rise in importance and popularity slowly becoming a dependence, it is very important to make all the right moves, big or small, to stay relevant and “updated”. While the exact number of websites keeps changing every second, there are well over 1 billion sites on the internet. Hence, to stay visible and easily accessible to the target audience, there are certain parameters every website needs to follow. One such tool is the SEO- Search Engine Optimization, which follows some thumb-rules to keep a particular website user-friendly and browser friendly.
Today we will learn about one of the tools that help make a website suitable as per SEO- the Uniform Resource Locator or simply URL. Now, what a URL does is that it tells the address for any given unique resource on the web. How? It is a text that is human readable and it replaces the numbers (or IP address) of a website, that computers use to communicate with servers. For a URL to be SEO friendly, it needs to have the right structure, that leads to better ranks in search results. Any URL that isn’t optimal or correct isn’t recognised well by the search engines and hence will rank lower. A URL that is semantically correct will have better SEO ranking.
So what do we mean by “right structure” of a URL?
Any proper URL structure consists of the following five parts:
1. Hypertext Transfer Protocol (or http)
2. A domain name
3. Sub-directories (or sub folders)
4. Page name
5. Extension
Let’s try and understand in brief what the three main parts are-
Protocol:
The protocol is how a browser will communicate with the server and retrieve information about a resource. The standard ones are http:// (hypertext transfer protocol) and https:// (hypertext transfer protocol secure), the latter being “secure” as in this protocol, the data is sent after encryption using Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS).
Domain name:
The domain name is what represents a website on the World Wide Web, making it one of the most important elements of a URL structure. It is a human-readable name given to the specific location where a website is located. They should ideally be short, simple and representing the brand
Sub-directories:
The sub-folders or sub-directories are what keep the website’s structure organized and help the search engines to have an easier navigation through the content folders of a website. From SEO perspective, the URL structure should not be too deep or long.
Hence, to sum it up, best practices to be adopted while creating URLs that will be SEO-friendly is to
- Keep the URLs concise, simple, accurate and relevant to the content.
- Avoid using underscores or spaces or any other word-separators other than hyphens.
- Use lowercase letters and avoid mixed cases .
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