I churn out a lot of sites at the moment, so I'm interested in learning The Right Wayâ„¢ of building sites from an SEO perspective. I don’t expect issues like the one below to have a huge effect, but every-little-helps and over a lot of sites it will all add up Anyway, on to the question (which I will present as a contrived example)… You are building a site for an airline who fly to many destinations all over the world. You need a page that discusses flights in general and your USPs, and below that each destination needs its own page. Your main target keyphrases are “country flights†and “cheap flights to countryâ€. Which of the following structures do you use: http://foo.com/flights/uzbekistan Code (markup): or http://foo.com/flights/to/uzbekistan Code (markup): That is, would the benefit of having more of your keyphrase in the URL (increased relevance, bolding in the SERPs, etc) as in the latter case outweigh any potential penalty of a page being further down the directory structure. Could the “to†may also dilute the relevance for other keyphrases not containing that word? In the latter case the “to†page would either 301 to the “flights†page, or just have a list of links to all the individual destination pages. Please vote in the poll, and I’d love to hear your reasoning in a reply.
I would go for http://foo.com/flights/uzbekistan as you don't want the directories too deep so that it would cause issues for the search bots. Personally I don't use directories at all, I use keywords in the url i.e. domain.com/fights-uzbekistan.html It works for me but I wouldn't normally recommend it as some people tend to think its a bit spammy.