URL Structure
URL structure refers to the format, hierarchy, and naming conventions of your website's addresses, which communicate page content and site organization to both users and search engines.
Clean URL structure improves SEO, user experience, and shareability. Best practices: use lowercase, use hyphens to separate words (not underscores), keep URLs short and descriptive, include target keywords naturally, and mirror your site hierarchy (e.g., `/blog/technical-seo/core-web-vitals`).
Avoid: long query parameters, session IDs in URLs, unnecessary depth (more than 3-4 levels), and encoded characters. Each URL should be human-readable — a user should be able to guess the page content from the URL alone.
In Next.js App Router, URL structure maps directly to your file system: `app/glossary/[slug]/page.tsx` creates `/glossary/meta-description`. This convention naturally produces clean URLs. Indxel validates URL structure, checks for excessively long URLs, and flags non-standard characters.
Related terms
Slug
A slug is the human-readable, URL-friendly portion of a web address that identifies a specific page, typically derived from the page title using lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens.
Permalink
A permalink (permanent link) is a URL that is intended to remain unchanged indefinitely, serving as a stable reference to a specific piece of content.
Site Architecture
Site architecture is the hierarchical structure and organization of a website's pages, URLs, and navigation, determining how content is grouped, linked, and accessed by users and search engine crawlers.
Stop shipping broken SEO
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