Get In Touch
A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is what you call a Link; it locates a specific webpage or resource on the internet.
A URL follows a rigid structure to make it easier for users to navigate your website, and for search engines, it helps them to grasp your page’s content easily.
It is made up of various parts, and all of them combined form a functional URL.
I’ll explain each component chronologically for better understanding:
The first component, Protocol, specifies a set of rules that decide how data is transmitted between the browser and the server hosting the website.
HTTPS is also crucial to protect a user’s data by safeguarding them from malicious and dubious websites.
The second component in the structure, Subdomain, sits right before the main domain name, acting as a prefix. Without a subdomain, you’d have to create hundreds of main domains for every page.
A subdomain organizes and divides multiple pages’ content within the same website, for example:
It is also called the root domain, which is the name of your brand followed by the domain address.
For example, to navigate to Nike, you’d simply type in the search box “nike.com”. This will be referred to as the main domain.
Just as the subdomain acts as a prefix, the TLD, similarly, acts as a suffix. A TLD indicates the nature of a website. (.org) indicates non-profits, (.gov) represents government sites, (.edu) denotes educational institutes, and there are a plethora of domains.
The path shows the location of the resource. While browsing a site, users visit multiple inner pages within a website. For example, if they are shopping for apparel, they’ll click on shirts, then navigate to formal shirts.
The path displays this journey as: products/shirts/formal shirts.
An SEO-friendly URL is one that can be read by a human and understood by search engines. A URL becomes SEO-friendly only when it is well structured and helps in improving a site’s performance, such as improving click-through rates (CTR), user experience, and increasing ranking potential.
This is what a well-structured, SEO-inclined URL looks like:
The most convincing reason that I could give you to structure your URL properly is that it plays a decisive part in how search engines interact with your site and adds to the overall user experience. To dwell upon it more, here’s why it matters:
A jumbled-up URL in gibberish makes it a nightmare for site crawlers to sort and understand the site’s hierarchy. And many URLs don’t contain targeted keywords, which signals the crawler that this URL might not be worth ranking.
This directly affects your site’s rankings, and if any of your site URLs look like this, you should read the URL best practices section of this blog:
While researching, I often visit multiple pages within a site, but one look at the address bar makes it clear what path I followed and on which page I am.
Therefore, including all the users and myself, expect a well-structured URL that clearly conveys the page’s content and doesn’t look like Hammurabi’s code when shared with a person.
When a site contains two pages with little to no difference between the content of each page, the risk of canonicalization arises, and the search crawlers get confused about which page to rank because they both look exactly similar. Hence, they don’t rank either of them.
Something similar happens when two URLs conflict with each other, although they define two different pages, crawlers find it hard to discern between the two. So you should always structure your URL according to the page to help search engines index the intended version of the page.
Properly structured URLs with HTTPS protocol (e.g., /images/, /api/) reduce the chances of unethical intervention and send decipherable information to the servers.
The optimum length as prescribed by Google is 60 characters. Anything more than that doesn’t necessarily hurt SEO; it only gets truncated, which takes away from the user experience.
Targeted keywords are placed in the slug component of the URL, which comes immediately after the domain name. The slug has one purpose, which is to describe the page’s content by displaying the keyword.
(https://viralchilly.com/page?id=12345) ❌
(https://viralchilly.com/seo-best-practices) ✅
Make your URL meaningful by adding targeted keywords in the slug and increasing the chances of getting ranked on the SERP.
URLs are case sensitive, which means this type of case: example.com/SEO-Guide (mixed case), will create duplicate content issues, while special characters look like you smashed your keyboard while structuring the URL, which neither the keyboard nor the users like.
Besides users, not even search engines are fond of URLs with random characters, unnecessary spacing, and inconsistent capitalization, due to the previously mentioned issue of duplicate content, which sends incorrect ranking signals to the crawler.
Here is a bad example:
(“example.com/category/subcategory/product/type/brand/model/variant/page”)
What excessive subfolders do to your link is they make crawling a mountain climb for search engines, but still, they are quite useful for users, because they showcase a detailed path from the home page to the pages that the user has navigated to.
You shouldn’t use URLs generated by a CMS because they have everything that an SEO-friendly URL shouldn’t have, from unnecessary characters to capitalized letters with no targeted keywords.
An auto-generated URL will impact CTR (click-through rate) because the user wouldn’t know where they’re about to enter and what information it presents.
Almost every site on the internet uses the HTTPS protocol, precisely 88%. But for awareness’s sake, I have mentioned it, because the SEO world is like a Pandora’s box; you don’t know what you might encounter after opening it.
Google recommends hyphens (-) to separate words in the URL for a better user experience, as underscores are not as prominent as hyphens are in denoting a separation. So the user finds it easy to make sense of the URL.
Even I wondered why a URL, a simple-looking line of clickable text, even has types?
Turns out, each type of URL serves a specific purpose that others can’t. For instance, an absolute URL “(https://site.com/image.jpg)” indicates the exact location of the resource and has the full address, protocol, and domain name.
While a relative URL (/image.jpg) only provides a path to the resource rather than the full address within a page.
So, it's time we uncover the purpose of each type of URL:
It has the full web address, from protocol to domain name, the typical URL you see every day. The purpose of an absolute URL is to display clear information to crawlers, search engines, and users with no space for confusion. Hence, it is useful when shared as an external link and when a complete web address is required.
It is less descriptive than an absolute URL; it only contains the path, omitting anything before it.
This is an absolute URL: https://viralchilly.com/blog/And this is a relative URL: /blog/
When a site has multiple pages with similar content, Google and other search engines get confused about what URL to display. By using a canonical URL, you tell the search engines that this is the master URL that needs to be displayed on the SERP (Search Engine Result Page).
If you want to dig deep into the canonical URL rabbit hole, read this.
A Dynamic URL is used for those pages whose content changes frequently. It is generated on the fly from the server-side and contains special characters such as “?”, “=”, and “&”. While a static URL is good for pages whose content remains the same for every visitor, such as informational content. It is easier to crawl and index.
It is the shorter and concise version of the full web address. Used tos share information on social media.
Both of these terms are used interchangeably; links are often used more outside the SEO domain when referring to the URL (Uniform Resource Locator). But for those who are as scrupulous as I, details matter.
The splitting difference between a URL and a link is that a link is a user-facing element that uses a URL to migrate you to the desired web resource, while a URL is the raw web address of a resource on the Internet.
Let’s dig deep:
A link, also referred to as a hyperlink, is the blue clickable element that users click to go to a different web address. Links on their own cannot direct users from one address to another, so they use URLs to determine the address the user wants to navigate to.
In this sense, you can say that links are a part of the URL.
Essentially, a URL denotes where something can be found on the vast internet. Unlike a link, it provides a complete address to locate and access the shared resource.
AI hasn’t had a revolutionary effect on URL, not till now.
For now, AI has transformed how URLs are generated. With the vast amount of user data and above-par intelligence, it can optimize URLs at scale for keywords, search intent, and SEO performance, without human interference.
Moreover, agencies have started to structure their URLs in a manner that is favorable to AI search engines so that when a user searches, their site’s URL gets cited in AI overviews. This shift is closely aligned with modern Answer Engine Optimization strategies, where structured URLs and semantic clarity play a major role. We’ll start optimizing our URLs soon enough, and you should too.
Talking about the AI Overview, which has become a controversial feature on the SERP, I have to say that the organic CTR (Click-through Rate) has taken a hit after its introduction. So you and I, including a plethora of other SEO agencies, have to adapt and optimize our URLs for AI.
URLs are important for SEO, undoubtedly. Various types of URLs perform different functions to direct a user to a linked source and help crawlers crawl and index your page.
Avoid the common mistakes, and ensure your URL is SEO-friendly and has all the required components to help users and search engines understand the content of your website better.
Also, keep an eye out for the changes that AI is bringing to URLs and other SEO components because SEO is rapidly evolving, leaving behind agencies and strategies that are myopic and overconfident.
If you'd like to expand your SEO horizons further, feel free to explore my other in-depth blogs.
