The content of URLs may often be overlooked; however, they have a lot of importance in search engine rankings. In a future tutorial we will explain how to fully optimize your URL’s, but beforehand we first must understand how a URL is organized and what it is made up of. This tutorial will introduce six key components of URLs and explain their meaning and use.  It is imperative to understand each and every element of a URL as it will further your knowledge of their importance to the SEO world.

1. HTTP (Hyper Text Transport Protocol)

Definition:  An application-level protocol for collaborative information systems in which resources from the site can be viewed.

Key HTTP facts:

- Ensures that webpages can be indexed by search engines and allows us to see if a webpage can be reached in a web-browser.

- Determines which Communication Port to use. This is important because different protocols typically use different ports.

2. WWW (World Wide Web)

Definition: A system of internet servers that carry documents formatted in HTML (see below) that provides links to audio, video and graphic files and is accessed through the internet. WWW is a part of the domain name which is commonly known as the subdomain.

Key subdomain facts:

- Typically, websites contain either “www” or have no subdomain at all.

- Web sites with many pages, typically from larger companies, often use atypical subdomain names to differentiate between different major sections, topics within their sites or services. For example:  msnbc.msn.com.

- There can be multiple levels within subdomains. For example, assets.espn.go.com. There are often few restrictions to their length, but some scheme links may often be much longer.

- Typically, subdomains can, convert to a separate IP address than the primary domain name.

-A different subdomain is often a distinct webserver for non-SEO applications. Nevertheless, it continues to be under the control of the same primary domain owner. For example, CNN is the only site that can make use of uniquename.cnn.com because the Domain Name Server (DNS) addressing is tied to their primary domain, cnn.com, which is solely under CNN’s control.

- Subdomain names are not case-sensitive. For example, Msnbc.Msn.com is the same as msnbc.msn.com.

3. DOMAIN

Definition: Commonly referred to as Domain name, this is used to identify the host the host, or owner, of a specific Web site.

Key Domain Name facts

- The Domain Name System (DNS) translates the domain name section, along with the .com, into a numeric IP address. This is used to attach to the actual webserver that hosts the resource.

- The hostname is what the domain name is often referred to as. This is simply the name of the computer where it is hosted.

- A domain name may only be compiled of hyphens, digits or letters.

- Domain names can only be 63 characters in length, with few exceptions for extensions such as “.weather”, in order to accommodate the length of the extension.

- Like subdomains, domain names are not case-sensitive.

- “.com” is the last element of the domain name, referring to the Top Level Domain, or TLD, which is also not case sensitive.

- There are three different ways in which TLD’s can be classified:

- Generic: .com, .org, .gov, .edu, .biz, etc.

- Country Codes: .ca, .ru, .jp

- Infrastructure: .arpa (for SEO purposes we can ignore this TLD)

4. SUBDIRECTORY

Definition: A “file” in an organizational unit called a directory. For example, www.espn.com/basketball, in which “basketball” would be the subdirectory.

5. FILENAME

Definition: The name a computer attaches to a document to identify it

6. .HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)

Definition: An extension of the filename that tells us the programming language used to code the page. Simply put, .html tells us that it’s a normal webpage.

Note: While we have pointed out which URL aspects are not case-sensitive, everything that was covered beyond the TLD, such as subdirectory, filename, and extension, are all case-sensitive. This means that content.html is not the same as Content.Html.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 25th, 2009 at 10:48 am and is filed under SEM Tutorial, SEO Friendly Web Design, Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Site Architecture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.