URL

What is a URL in SEO?

URL is an abbreviation for universal resource locator, or URL for short. It tells the computer where a web page or file is located on another computer. When you type in www.example.com/ebooks/seo-strategy-ebook.pdf then you are telling your computer to find the server (a server is just a computer that has the specific job of serving up files) that is hosting the example.com domain and then go to the ‘ebook’ folder on that website to find the PDF specified.

The fact that a URL is easily readable by humans is because it has been re-written to be like that. Computers actually look up the IP address (eg. 192.168.0.1) and the IP address is mapped to the human-readable URL.

The exact same mechanism is used to show you this page you are on right now.

The URL is: https://seoglossary.co/url/

Your computer is looking up which server the domain seoglossary.co is hosted on using the domain nameservers (DNS), finding out the IP address of that server, and then asking the server to show the content in the /url/ folder.

I’m using WordPress which uses code to re-write the URLs to be more friendly to humans. There is no folder called /url/ on the server but the code is telling the server that if someone requests this URL, then it will find the content to show in another location.

Some people call this re-writing of URLs as SEO-friendly URLs as you can create URLs that contain your keywords from dynamic content. Others call it a Permalink because that’s what WordPress calls URLs that have been re-written.

The process of re-writing URLs is called URL optimzation for SEO. It can have a small impact on your rankings, but is generally considered to be best practice to optimize your URLs.

Learn more about URLs for SEO:

• https://syspree.com/url-optimization-guide/