The name of the protocol: the "language" used by your browser to access the resource. The most widely used protocol on the web is HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure), the protocol for exchanging web pages in HTML format over a secure channel (its non-secure counterpart being HTTP).

Username and password (optional): Allows you to specify the parameters for accessing a secure server. This option is not recommended because the password is visible within the URL

The server name: domain name of the computer hosting the requested resource.

The port number (optional): the "front door" of a server through which to request a resource. The default port associated with HTTPs is port number 443 (80 for HTTP). When the server's web service is associated with port number 443, the port number is optional because the browser will automatically use this port when contacting the server.

The path to the resource: this allows the server to know where the resource is located, i.e. the location (directory) and name of the requested file.

For users, because your URL is not only directly visible in their browser, but is also one of the first elements of your site that is presented to them during a Google search. Therefore, clear URLs directly inform the user about the content of your pages, allow them to access them easily and improve your visit rate,

For search engines (and therefore your SEO), because the URL can facilitate their understanding of the theme addressed in the page: integrating keywords in your URL can therefore promote its referencing.

Keywords: Your URL must contain the main keyword of your request. On the query "women's shoes" above, we can see that all the results on the 1st page put this keyword in their URL.

Size: It is generally recommended to have URLs of less than 100 characters, which in most cases is enough to include the main keyword while keeping the URL concise.

Ergonomics: As mentioned above, a readable and clear URL for both your users and search engines will help improve your appeal:

Organize your content, the way your URL is written will give information about its importance.

Choose single hyphens rather than underscores

Integrate your mobile URLs into the sitemap, this will let search engines know which pages are mobile friendly and which are not.

Insert in your URL the main keyword covering the theme of your page (at least in the categories and products pages: the URL of the homepage must be simple!)

Block your "technical" URLs (pages that have no interest in being directly referenced by search engines, such as test pages for a new version of your site, payment pages ...) with robots.txt: the time spent by search engines on your site is not unlimited, so they might as well focus on pages that are important to you.

Put "canonical" tags in your URLs when necessary: some pages can sometimes create duplicate content when they are dynamically generated, in which case it is preferable to indicate a reference version that the search engine should index.

Do not use capital letters or complex characters (even accents should be avoided in URLs, as they can be encoded and difficult to decipher).

Don't forget to set up 301 redirects for broken or old URLs, to capture all your potential traffic.

When pages are likely to have duplicate content, use the "canonical" tag to tell the search engine that only one version of those pages should be indexed.