What is Domain, URL Structure, Title Tag?
A URL consists of a protocol, domain name, and path (which
includes the specific subfolder structure where a page is located) and has the
subsequent basic format: protocol://domain-name.top-level-domain/path. The
protocol shows how a browser should retrieve information about a resource.
A title tag is an HTML element that defines the title of a web page. Title tags are presented on search engine results pages (SERPs) as the clickable headline for a given result and are important for usability, SEO, and social sharing.
Many of your visitors will come to your website by clicking on a link, so you may wonder if it really matters what’s in the actual URL of a specific page.
It may surprise you to know that when it comes to on-site
SEO, what your URLs look like is actually really important.
What is URL
Structure?
Your website URL runs as your address on the web. It’s the
most direct way for someone to visit a page on your website. If you’re not
familiar with the term, the URL is the thing that starts with either www or
HTTP.
In the early stages of starting a website, you want to sit
down and figure out a standard structure for your website URLs. (If your
website is already established and growing, it’s not too late to do this now,
it just might require more work.)
Your URLs always start with the root domain for your website
(e.g. www.yourwebsitename.com), so what you want to set is what follows for
individual pages.
Your URL structure will immediately relate to your larger
site architecture. You want your URLs to both reference what’s on the specific
page, as well as help, situate the website visitor to where this page belongs
on the larger website. For example, the URL for a post on your blog should look
something like this: www.yourwebsitename.com/blog/nameofyourblogpost
At a glance at the URL, any visitor who reached the post
through an outside link would quickly be able to see that they’re on a blog, as
well as some basic information about the specific blog post on the page.
Why Does URL
Structure Matter?
Your URL structure matters for a few key purposes.
First, for Google to consistently deliver appropriate
results to searchers, it has to know what each page in its index is about. The
URL is one of the most critical parts of the page Google looks at to decide
what a page is about.
Next, an automatic URL structure makes your site easier to
operate for users. If someone browsing a retail website for clothes finds
themselves on the page www.clothesretailer.com/womens/dresses/nameofspecificdress,
they know the page belongs in the two sections that precede the final part of
the HTML: women’s clothes and dresses. Savvy web users also know they can
delete the last few parts of the URL (dresses/nameofspecificdress) to get back
to the larger selection of women’s clothes.
And lastly, the same thing that makes a good URL structure
automatic for users is good for search engines too. The search engine crawler
can more easily make the appropriate links between different pages on your
website – it can see that a particular
item belongs in the same category as other dresses (even if “dress” isn’t in
the product name), which belong in the larger category of women’s clothes on
the site – information that helps the crawler better understand what different
sections of the website are about and how they relate to each other.
As an attached benefit, having those extra categories lead
the specific keyword or product name in your URL adds in some extra relevant
keywords without creating a URL that’s spammy.
That gives Google just a little bit more information to make sure it
understands what’s on the page and knows what keywords the page should show up
in the search for.s
7 Tips for Creating a
Good URL Structure
The URL is a pretty basic part of on-site optimization, but
one that it’s important to get right. Here are a few good ways to make
sure you use your URLs wisely.
1. Always edit a page’s URL to be relevant.
2. Follow a standard URL structure.
3. Keep it short and simple.
4. Use your primary keyword.
5. Use hyphens to separate words.
6. Remove stop words.
7. Use canonical tags where needed.
