Constructing URLs and Browser Titles

A URL is itself a label, and a human-readable one lets people understand a link's destination before clicking it, or confirm they've arrived at the right place after. Good URLs stay short, use common, correctly spelled words, and mirror the same terminology as the navigation system and content categories, so a page about power drills sits under a path like "/tools/power-drills" rather than an opaque string of characters. Pages should ideally persist forever; when a URL genuinely has to change, a redirect from the old address protects both users with old bookmarks and any links pointing in from elsewhere on the web.

A browser title is a related but distinct label, the metadata that appears on a browser tab, becomes the default name for a bookmark, and is exactly what search engines display as the clickable link text on a results page. A vague or generic browser title can quietly suppress traffic that would otherwise have clicked through, even when the underlying page content is exactly what the searcher wanted.

A URL and a browser title are both promises made before a click happens, break either one, and a visitor either never clicks at all, or clicks and immediately doubts they're in the right place.

Exercise

The scenario: A software company recently migrated its marketing website to a new platform. Several URL and browser title problems have emerged since.

1. The pricing page's URL changed from "/pricing" to "/page?id=3391&v=2," and the old URL now returns a plain error with no redirect.
2. A blog post about onboarding best practices has the browser title "Post-4821-Draft-FINAL2," left over from an internal file name.