if you're going to be doing SEO you're
going to become intimately familiar with
URLs let's start by looking at the
components of a URL you can break any
URL into five components at the
beginning we have the protocol this is
going to be either HTTP or HTTPS
depending on whether or not your site is
secure followed by colon slash slash the
subdomain follows the protocol in most
cases the subdomain is simply WW but on
larger sites separate sections can live
under a separate custom sub domain the
search engines look at subdomains as
separate entities from the main website
so authority is calculated independently
next we've got the domain name which is
your custom name for the website
while google has released several exact
match domain name updates to lessen the
power of a domain name made up of exact
match keyword phrases it's still
beneficial to use a domain that includes
your important keywords the top-level
domain
follows the domain name this is your
dot-com dotnet org or any of the various
TL DS that are available any page other
than the home page will include a slug
at the end which is everything that
comes after the TLD the slug can include
subfolders or simply be a page address
at the root of the site think of the
slug as the actual address for the
individual page on that specific domain
URLs are an important part of SEO it's
important to create URLs that are
keyword focused while still being unique
and as short as possible when you're
using multiple words in the slug you
should use hyphens to separate the words
like this you could also use underscores
like this
or pluses like this but according to
best practice you should use hyphens
make sure users can understand what the
page is about but try to leave out words
like an or the they're not really
necessary for humans or for search
engines avoid including the same keyword
more than once as well in a perfect
world a pages URL would be constant but
unfortunately we all know it's not a
perfect world when you change website
platforms or rollout site updates
sometimes the URLs will change since
Google assigns authority at the page
level you don't want to lose any value
when the URL of a page has to change
also if there are any other sites on the
internet that link to the old URL users
who click on an old link will land on a
404 page and think your site's broken in
these situations you'll want to set up
URL redirects a redirect is a directive
that tells browsers and search engines
that a page has been moved to new
address it's great for users because
it's an automatic seamless experience
for search engines the value of the
original page will be passed to the new
address to set up a redirect you need
three important components the source or
original URL the type of redirect you're
using and the destination or new URL
there are several types of redirects but
as an SEO you really only need to know
two of them the first is a 301 redirect
this is what you'll use in nearly every
case it tells the browser or search
engine that the page has permanently
moved to the new address in certain
cases you might also use a 302 redirect
which is a temporary redirect search
engines won't pass Authority through a
302 redirect so it should only be used
during truly temporary situations like
site maintenance when you're starting
SEO work on a new site it's important to
analyze any 301 or 302 redirects that
have been setup in the past you'll
want to avoid adding redirects to any
redirects that have previously been
added