Within reason:
The name of the link should equal the page name.
The page name should equal the title element.
The title element should equal the file name.
Also known as the Universal Resource Indicator (URI), the URL is determined by the directory structure of the site coupled with the file name. An example is the csun.edu Accessibility site. Located in a directory one level off the root named “accessibility” the URL is: http://www.csun.edu/accessibility. Since the Accessibility site mainpage is “index.html” no file name appears in the URL. Only one page per directory gets this free ride, all subsequent pages display the file name in the URL. Once we go down a level, to the ATI Coordinators page, a file name appears after the directory name like this: http://www.csun.edu/accessibility/aticoordinators.html.
Note that:
The link, “ATI Coordinators,” equals the name of the page, “ATI Coordinators.”
The name of the page, “ATI Coordinators,” equals the title element, “ATI Coordinators.”
The title element, “ATI Coordinators,” equals the file name, “aticoordinators.html.”
Invalid Characters
Do not use & (ampersand) or spaces without an underscore (_) in any link or filename as the ampersand will not pass W3C validation and the space will show up as “%20.” Do not use ~ (tilde) where possible – the university helpdesk can help you eliminate the tilde. The specification for URLs limits the use of allowed characters in URLs to only a limited subset of the US-ASCII character set:
"...Only alphanumerics [0-9a-zA-Z], the special characters $-_.+!*'(), and reserved characters used for their reserved purposes may be used unencoded within a URL." http://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc1738.txt
Directory Structure
Use the following schema for directory structure:
http://www.csun.edu/division/department/project.html.
An example is:
http://www.csun.edu/ua/development/annualgiving/.
The following schema is highly discouraged:
http://foo.csun.edu.