A Short & Sweet Guide

If your website is like a house, your website url will be the address of that house. It defines where your website is online, much like your home address determines where you live in a neighborhood, and helps your visitors find your website easily. URLs also help Google understand what your website pages are about.

Technically, a URL is made up of five elements that are unobtrusively important for optimizing the user experience (UX) and SEO of your website. To help you develop a concrete understanding of each part of a URL, let’s examine each of them in detail.

Below is an illustration of the different parts of a URL.

Let’s break down this URL structure below.

Url structure

To plan

The scheme tells web servers which protocol to use when accessing a page on your website.

Nowadays, HTTPS – which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure – is the most common scheme. It instructs your web browser to encrypt any information you enter on the page, such as your passwords or credit card information, so that cyber criminals cannot access it. This security protocol protects your website visitors and helps your website rank better on Google. For this reason, implementing SSL is a must in any technical SEO guide.

Other schemes you might see include mailto: //, which can open your computer’s default email service provider to help you compose an email to the email address you have in the Entered url and ftp: //, a standard protocol for transferring computer files between a client and a server on a computer network.

Subdomain

If your website is like a house, then your subdomains are like specific rooms in that house. A subdomain in a URL specifies which particular page of your website the web browser should display. For example, subdomains such as “Blog” or “Offers” provide the blog or landing page of your website.

Subdomains also break your website down into the most important content categories, showing Google and your visitors that there is more information on your website than just a homepage.

Second level domain

Your second level domain (SLD) is the name of your website. It helps people know that they are visiting a particular brand’s website. For example, mlb.com visitors know they are on the Major League Baseball website without asking for more information.

Top-level domain

The top-level domain (TLD) indicates what type of entity your organization is registered as on the internet.

For example, “.com” is intended for commercial companies in the United States, so many American companies register with the top-level domain “.com”. Similarly, “.edu” is intended for academic institutions in the United States, so many American colleges and universities register with the top-level domain “.edu”.

Subdirectory

A subdirectory – also known as a subfolder – helps both users and web crawlers understand which area of ​​a web page they are currently in.

For example, if you have an online store that sells t-shirts, hats, and mugs, one of the URLs on your website might look like “https://shop.yourstore.com/hats”. Note that the subdomain is “shop” and the subdirectory is “hats”. This means that this url would serve the “hats” page, which is a subfolder of the “shop” page. T-shirts and mugs would be other sub-folders from this page.

URL structure: Subtle but essential

While URLs may seem simple and frivolous, they are important to your website’s UX and SEO. And now that you understand the anatomy of a URL, check out the following blog posts to learn more about technical SEO.