Creating categories and categorical url structures:

[optycont]

In my experience, sites that are logically grouped and categorized by your target phrases perform better than sites that simply have a home page that delivers straight to an item, product or article page.

Ideally, for a user and a crawler optimization a site should go like:
vacations.com/caribbean-packages/jamaica.htm[/url]
rather than
vacations.com/caribbean-packages
or
vacations.com[/url] /jamaica-packages.htm
vacations.com[/url] /barbados-packages.htm
etc…

The first example gives the site more depth, more opportunity to capture additional search phrase and more opportunities for internal links etc…

In terms of the URL structure, my question is about redundancy:
Ex.
Category Page = Carnival Services
Service Page = Carnival Marketing, Carnival Management, Carnival Rentals
So then
carnyservices. com/carnival-services/marketing.htm
Or
carnyservices. com/carnival-services/management.htm
carnyservices. com/carnival-services/rentals.htm


Is there any advantage in terms of ranking if the URL reads,

carnyservices. com /carnival-services /carnival-management.htm
carnyservices. com /carnival-services /carnival-rentals.htm


Or is it better for rankings to be cleaner and not redundant.


Thanks for any thoughts.

[seonewbee]

This is nice " vacations.com/caribbean-packages/jamaica.htm", but how about " vacations.com/caribbeanvacations/jamaicangetaways.htm" ,or how about " vacations.com/caribbeanvacations/jamaica/getaways.htm" Then you could have a page called resorts and another destinations and another restaurants and another nighlife.


Just a thought.

[docquesting]

I bet folks forget to add an agriculture category.

Just a thought I was thinking of posting anyways.

[optycont]

Originally Posted by seonewbee

This is nice " vacations.com/caribbean-packages/jamaica.htm", but how about " vacations.com/caribbeanvacations/jamaicangetaways.htm" ,or how about " vacations.com/caribbeanvacations/jamaica/getaways.htm" Then you could have a page called resorts and another destinations and another restaurants and another nighlife.


Just a thought.

Agreed if my site had relevant content to drill down that deep then sure. /getaways and /agriculture and /dairy-cows!

[Dave Hawley]

Is there any advantage in terms of ranking if the URL reads,

carnyservices. com /carnival-services /carnival-management.htm
carnyservices. com /carnival-services /carnival-rentals.htm

Possibly a small amount. However, unless it starts to look spammy and beyond 3 deep, why would'nt you?

Those that link to it could be encouraged to use the keywords in the anchor text. Also, when a searcher scans the SERP's, they tend to see their keywords as a likely match and then click.