SEO Best Practice Question from a Domainer: Root vs. Directory URL naming structure

Hi all - I'm new here and I have a really interesting SEO problem. I'm hoping to get some advice from one of the SEO experts on here.

Here's the scenario:

1) I am a domainer with a really great domain name. It is a one word dictionary search term that gets approximately 45 million monthly searches (as per Google Keyword tool). Let's just say, hypothetically, that the domain name is: wine.com with the keyword "wine" getting approximately 45 million global monthly Google search queries. Yes, this is a very good domain name and is why I am paying such close attention to this problem.

2) I am now developing a web site on that domain name using a CMS. Normally that CMS would just be installed in the root directory. So, you'd type in www.wine.com and up would come the web site. Well, in this case, we're running our 'test and development' on a separate instance of the CMS inside a directory. For example, the same CMS is running on a separate database, files, etc behind www.wine.com/vino/. This has worked out great, but as we deploy the development releases over to the production live site at www.wine.com there's always some hassle because the path is not the same. i.e. www.wine.com is running the CMS from the root and www.wine.com/vino/ is running the CMS from the /vino/ directory. (I know we could be doing the development on a root localhost, but in this case, that is not an option.)

3) So what we're thinking of doing is doing a re-direct from www.wine.com straight to www.wine.com/vino/ and then doing the development at www.wine.com/vinodev/. This would make deployment of new developments from the development CMS instance to the production CMS instance much simpler. Going forward it would also eliminate www.wine.com as our home page in the search engines and instead make www.wine.com/vino/ our new home page in the search engines.

4) The problem, and my question, is related to how search engines will score our home page located at www.wine.com/vino/ versus at www.wine.com. Since google gives some 'cred' to web sites with domain names that match the search terms exactly, our 'wine.com' is the perfect domain name for the 45 million per month "wine" search term. We're worried though that if we redirect wine.com to wine.com/vino/ the 'purity' of our 'perfect' domain name relevance score for the pure one word search term "wine" will be obscured by including the "vino" term in the URL path. I know one option would be to name the directory "wine" so the path could be www.wine.com/wine/. But what worries me is that the search engines might score our site as having the keyword "wine wine" instead of "wine" or worse that we might take some sort of penalty for 'keyword stuffing' the URL.

5) Anyway, I'm curious if anybody has any good thoughts on the relative merits of going with one of the following for our home page:

wine.com
wine.com/vino/
wine.com/wine/

6) I know this is a very minor issue, but as we all know, good SEO is doing all the small things correct to add up to one big result of high search rankings. Also, I know that there is a lot more that goes into SEO ranking than just the domain name and/or the keywords in the URL. The problem at hand is, holding everything else equal, to 'optimize' the URL of the home page between the following three options:

wine.com
wine.com/vino/
wine.com/wine/

Any thoughts would be much appreciated!

Beyond Domaining
http://beyonddomaining.com

 

hi,
SEO Best Practices in, meta tags , best title,Directory,Link Popularity,Spider Analysis,

thanks for sharing

Regards
Michal Smith

 

Good post here

 

The domain name does matter in SEO process.
If you are redirecting the domain, you will loose the ranking for short period & will gain after 2,3 months.
I will suggest not to redirect the domain to wine.com/vono.
The www.wine.com is absolutely perfect from SEO point of view