for your homepage, should it simply be he address.com, or is it beneficial in any way to do address.com/ ? I see alot of people use that slash, but I really dont know if that benefits or not.
Good question. I've never been sure, but I expect that it doesn't matter either way. Having said that I'm sure some person more knowledgable than I am will give us the definitive answer.
Best practice is to include the trailing slash in the url and leave it out of the link text as in: <a href="http://www.yourdomain.com/">yourdomain.com</a> This is because a url without a slash can cause extra processing as many servers will issue a redirect from yourdomain.com to yourdomain.com/ This follows directly from the standards RFC2396 section 3.2 in particular. - Michael
people who will link to your website usually forget the slash. and for search engines the page with the slash is a different url. so use the one with no slash in your links and make 301 redirect for the slash version in case someone used it to link to you. some cms use the slash as default with no easy way to change. so in this cases you will have to use the one with the slash and make 301 redirect on the other. 301 is the only solution for slash/non slash versions. also www and non www vesions