I want to ask your opinion what is better to use keyword rich FOLDERs or keywords rich FILEs in URLS for SEO purposes. 1. http://www.domain.com/keyword-phrase/index.html or 2. http://www.domain.com/keyword-phrase.html and another thing do you prefer hyphens or undescores? Thank you!
2 and hyphens. Related white papers mention 'importance' calculation methodologies (which might or might not have been implemented in current days algo's) which are based on how 'far' a document is from the root, assuming the closer they are, the more important they are. Your first example's index.html is one branch further away from the root than your 2nd example keyword-phrase.html And as far as hypens vs underscores are concerned, I haven't checked for a while myself but it used to be that hyphens were the only separators of the two so keyword-phrase would be broken up by Google in two words whereas keyword_phrase would be just that, one word.
Hypens are definitely better (Google sees hypens as spaces, but underscores are treated as one word). As for folders vs filenames. I think using a combination of both should be the best option.
wouldn't http://www.domain.com/keyword-phrase/keyword-phrase.html be the best option?.. or is this to spammy? or even: http://keyword-phrase.domain.com/keyword-phrase/keyword-phrase.html ?