Lets say you own the domain: and you wanted to optimize for local searches for the phrase: Would it be wise to make a directory off the root called "in" to create a closer url match to the search phrase or is it better to stick to a topographical directory structure: Any Thoughts? or does this make no difference?
IMO Find-Hotels.us/California/Los-Angeles is superior to Find-Hotels.us/in/New-York from a user experience perspective as long as you have a page for Find-Hotels.us/California/ AND a page for Find-Hotels.us/California/Los-Angeles. Lots of people will navigate your site by truncating Los-Angeles from the Find-Hotels.us/California/Los-Angeles URL and expect their to be a page atFind-Hotels.us/California/ about California hotels. If you use Find-Hotels.us/in/New-York and someone truncates New-York leaving the new URL Find-Hotels.us/in/ then what are you going to display for the "in" page? It doesn't make sense to have folder names in the URL if their is no page that exists there. If you don't have a page at Find-Hotels.us/in/ and the user navigates to there by truncating the original URL, your web server is going to return a 404 Not Found error to the user. Bad user experience. Plus by having Find-Hotels.us/California/Los-Angeles as your URL structure you are creating a theme pyramid (see Brett Tabke's explanation in Blue/Red 4 post down in thread) where your home page ranks for "find hotels", the Find-Hotels.us/California/ URL ranks for "find hotels california" or "find hotels in california", and Find-Hotels.us/California/Los-Angeles ranks for "find hotels los angeles california" or "find hotels in los angeles california". The deeper into the site you click, the more specific the targeted keyword phrases become (i.e. the more long tail). And for any given page (other than the home page) it's parent is about the same topic and more general... it's children are about the same topic and more specific. PS: I'd reconsider using a .us TLD and look for a good .com domain name if I were you. While it won't effect your rankings from an SEO perspective, .com sites are seen by users and other webmasters as more legitimate business sites. Users will be more likely to click on a .com URL in the SERPs than they would .us URLs in the SERPs. And webmasters will be more likely to link to .com URLs than to .us URLs.
I agree. Using Find-Hotels.us/in/New-York is not going to help your rankings in terms of having a matching URL. And it doesn't make sense from a user point of view. If you are ever thinking about doing something that doesn't make sense from a user point-of-view you need to stop and think about if it is actually worth it. IME it usually isn't.