The parts of a URL (part 1)

Read this if: You need to make decisions on the appearance and format of your site URL to optimize traffic to your web site.

Every web page of every web site has a uniform resource locator (URL) that a browser uses to locate a particular page.  The specific components of a URL can help or hurt your web site performance.  Often, URL components are set arbitrarily by system administrators who don’t understand how the URL can affect site performance.  This article (part 1) breaks down the basic parts of the URL so you can make an informed decision on the URL of your site to maximize the benefit.  Part 2 will dive deeper into the URL to discuss dynamic URL components and their impact.

Below is a diagram that connects the parts of a URL to the the web browsing process.  Each component is numbered and described here:

  1. http:// describes the protocol used for the connection.  In this case, http refers to the protocol that a web browser uses to talk with a web server.  If the user was requesting a file with an FTP client, the URL might have started with ftp:// instead.  This will always be http or https (encrypted) for web browsing.
  2. www identifies the resource within your domain.  This could be a subdomain or an individual server.  This is most commonly set as www, which points to your web server.  If you had two servers, one for web pages and one for videos you might give them the URL’s http://www.acme.com (for web pages) and http://video.acme.com (for videos).  As you can see from the URL’s, these generic names don’t mean anything without your domain name included.
  3. acme.com is your domain name.  This uniquely identifies your organizations resources and qualifies the resource name in #2 above.
  4. products is most commonly a subfolder within your web server.  There can be several levels of subfolders separated by a / (forward slash) as in http://www.acme.com/products/2008/tools/.
  5. list.html is the name of the web page in the products folder on the server.

The components of the URL contain keywords that are arguably as critical as content on your pages.  In the example above, we’ve selected names for the folder and file that will help search engines to classify this content and serve this page above less important pages.  For example, this page would rank higher in Google for the keywords “acme product list” than it would if the URL was http://www.acme.com/stuff/page.html.  Along with a comprehensive search engine optimization (SEO) program, this is going to bring more site visitors looking for your specific content.

Stay tuned for the part 2 where we will dive deeper into dynamic URL’s and discuss how to optimize them to maximize site traffic.

Thursday, October 2nd, 2008

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