There's a standard. /usr was often a different partition.
/bin - system binaries
/sbin - system binaries that need superuser privileges
/usr/bin - Normal binaries
/usr/sbin - normal binaries that require superuser privileges
/usr/local/bin - for executables that aren't 'packaged' - i.e., installed by you or some other program system-wide
Actually binaries can include non-executable files as well! Strictly speaking, a "binary" refers to pretty much any file that's not plain-text (so if you tried to open a binary in a text editor, you'd see gibberish).