URL structure + process for a large travel site

[onefinestay]

Hello,

I am looking at the URL structure for a travel site that will want to optimise lots of locations to a wide variety of terms, so for example

hotels in london
hotels in kensington (which is in london)
five star hotels in kensington
etc

I am keen to see if my thought process is correct as you see so many different URL techniques out there. Or am i overthinking it too much?

Lets assume we make the page

/london/ as our homepage.

we would then logically link to

/london/hotels  to optimise specifically for 'london hotels'

We then have two options in my mind for optimising for 'kensington hotels':

Link to a page that keeps /london/hotels/ in its URL to maintain consistency ie

A.   /london/hotels/kensington

or should we be linking to:

B. /london/kensington/hotels/

(as it allows us to maintain a logical geo-landing page hierarchy)

I feel A is good as the URL matches the search phrase 'hotels in kensington' matches the order of the search phrase, but it loses value if any links find these pages with 'kensington' in the anchor text, as they would not really strengthen the 'kensington' hub page.

/london/kensington

Ie: i land on the 'kensington hotels' page and want to see more about kensington, then i could go from

/london/kensington/hotels
to
/london/kensington

quite easily and logically in the breadcrumb.

I feel B. is the best option for now.. Happy to

I am only musing as i see some good sites that use option A, which effectively pushes the location (/kensington/ to the end of the URL for each additional niche sub page, ie /london/hotels/five-star-hotels/kensington/)

Some of the bigger travel sites dont even use folder, they just go:
example.com/five-star-hotels-in-kensington/

Comments welcome!!!

Thanks

[katemorris]

I think B is the better choice as Kensington is a part of London, a suburb if you may. Being in the "right" word order is just not that important to ranking in the URL or the Title Tag. What matters most is that people can find the right page to answer their query. Just make sure each page has relevant, original content to that page and it answers the targeted query and you'll be fine!