URL

URL is an abbreviation for Uniform Resource Locator. It was previously known as the Universal Resource Locator and is most commonly pronounced as ‘Earl’ in some quarters. The URL is a unique address for a file with the help of which a person can access it on the Internet. It is also one of the simplest ways of visiting a web site. You just have to enter the URL on the home page file of your Web browser.

You can also access any file that is present within the Web site with the help of the URL. You can either specify an image file, Web (HTML) page other than home page, a Java applet and even a program such as a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) application.

The URL consists of the protocol that is to be used to access the file resource, a pathname, a hierarchical description, which specifies the location of the particular file in the computer and a domain name, which identifies a specific computer on the Internet.

On the Web, which uses the Hypertext Transfer Protocol, or HTTP, a URL appears in the following manner http://www.abcd.org/def/def1234.txt, which specifies the use of HTTP (Web browser) application, a unique computer named www.abcd.org, and the location of a text page or file, def1234.txt, to be accessed on that computer, which has a pathname /def/def1234.txt.

History

The URL was first created in the year 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee and the URI working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force . Berners Lee had earlier used dots to separate the parts of the domain name inside URLs but he then regretted it and wished that he had used slashes throughout. For instance, he proposed that it is better to use http:com/sample/www/path/to/name instead of http://www.sample.com/path/to/name . Twenty years after creating the URL, Tim Berners-Lee in an interview to Times newspaper also held a light apology for using the forward slashes (//) before the domain name.

Types of URL

URL is basically of two types, Absolute and Relative. The Absolute URL is a URL, which is independent of other elements and points directly to the exact file location For instance,”mywebsite.com/images/homepage.jpg” is an absolute URL, which specifies that the image file homepage.jpg is located in the images directory, under the mywebsite domain. A Relative URL is a type of URL, which is depended on other elements and point to a directory or file in relation to the present directory or file. A good example of this type of URL would be../image/homepage.jpg. In this, the first two periods (..) direct the server to move up one directory (the root directory), then enter images directory and then point to the homepage.jpg file. The main benefit of Relative URL is it helps the web masters to make changes in the directory as and when they want without rewriting the entire path again and again.

SEO benefits

There is a latest trend in the search engines, which says that URLs when shortened can really play a major role in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) of a web site. Many SEO experts advice that a URL of the form: www.yourwebsite.com/category/subcategory leads to better search engine rankings. . Google, a leading search engine has also developed URL shortener, which helps to convert longer URLs into short ones. This has been created in the view that, with shorter URLs, people can easily share the links of their web site on the popular social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook and in turn can get huge backlinks and increase traffic to their web site.