Which is the best URL structure for SEO and the UX?
Our article today tries to deepen a topic that is much debated in the international SEO community, namely the search for the best structure of the URL, the one that could provide better results in terms of placements on Google.
What is a URL: complete address of a site
Let’s start with the basic definitions on the URL and the standard structure that you can use, encoded by Internet Dad Tim Berners-Lee in the IETF RFC 3986 document. First of all, URL is an acronym for Uniform Resource Locator and is the sequence of characters that uniquely identifies any online resource, such as a page, image or file, also identifying the file structure of any site and representing the full address of a site.
The standard structure of URLs
There are essentially eight parts to each URL, including mandatory and optional elements: the first portion is represented by the protocol, which describes the system used to access servers. The current standard is http:// or https:// (where the “s” stands for more “secure”, as we said in the article on website migration), but there may also be paths such as mailto: (which automatically directs to the email client) or ftp: (to manage file transfer).
Url, meaning of the parts it is made of
The :// string follows which is a simple separator between the protocol and the remaining part of the URL, which is usually the host or, less frequently, the username. Until a few years ago, immediately after the protocol there was the possibility to specify the authentication credentials to access the online resource: the string username:password@ has been progressively abandoned because it risked to open the way to phishing (credentials were sent free to the server, without encryption, and the path could lead to pages other than those expected), and today this feature is disabled, although some browsers including Firefox keep it active, however reporting potential dangers to users.
The Url address, characters or numbers
In the most common formulations, after protocol and :// we can findd the indication of the domain name of the host, that is the address of the server on which the resource resides, that a software automatically converts in IP address making use of the <