What is a URL?
URL is an abbreviation of Uniform Resource Locator. It is used to point to resources on the internet and is often, somewhat loosely, translated as a path. Most commonly, it consists of a protocol (for example HTTP or HTTPS), a domain (example.com), and what is essentially the path (/category/), ending with a file name (page.html).
This would result in:
You will of course recognize this from the address bar in your web browser. However, URLs are far from always structured in this way. More advanced languages than plain HTML gave rise to what are known as dynamic URLs, which contain variables. From an SEO perspective, these are not quite as effective as traditional, static URLs like in the first example.
They can look like this:
It is possible to rewrite these into static URLs, and this is something we recommend to our clients. The reason is that a URL containing information that is readable to humans is also better from an SEO perspective. Google uses the information in the path to position pages in the correct search results.