Best website IA/structure for SEO?

[Gavin.Atkinson]

What's the current thinking on the best structure of information on a website for SEO? Structure for visitors can be best achieved through navigation menus, but I am more interested in how I should organise my URL structure so Google can make sense of the depth of my site topics.

The website is an Asian travel blog so there are essentially two specific types of post on the site. One type is location specific (may be about an attraction, a city, a region or a country). The other type is general (usually about an aspect of travel like travel cash, visas, scams, etc).

At the moment, all my general posts are organised like www.asiantraveltips.com/blog/[post-name]. My location-specific posts are organised like www.asiantraveltips.com/[country]/[region-or-city]/[place-name]/ so that Google can see I have depth of topics about each country and region. But I find it hard to keep consistency in this arrangement of URLs and I don't know if I might be better off to just have everything flat and tagged as a blog post like www.asiantraveltips.com/blog/[country]-[region-city]-[post-name]/?

What's best practice these days? How are others organising travel blog websites?

[ClaytonJ]

We are getting alot of immediate uplift for clients by adopting a silo structure. These are sites with a high reliance on content.

I am not sure if there are detailed articles on moz yet but try http://www.bruceclay.com/search/?cx='015472998223451858647%3A_jdk1qeo31u&cof=FORID%3A11&ie=UTF-8&q=silo&sa=Search

Hope this assists.

[Gavin.Atkinson]

Hi John, yes I was aware of that article from Bruce Clay and that's how I determined my original URL structure. I'm just not sure it's the most current advice any more.

[CleverPhD]

You can accomplish this IA with folders or with the slug, the key is how you interlink everything. That is how you can show your related articles and what the most important article is on a given topic.  The Bruce Clay article (IMHO) is still relevant, I think you do not need to get as granular due to things like Hummingbird.  I tend to think of organizing around a topic with a set of key words, vs getting super granular with the keyword siloing.  I think for the user it still makes sense that way as you need to make up an organizational structure that is simple and easy to understand vs having so many subcategories that they get confused.

Cheers!