Url structure of a blog

[BobAnderson]

We are trying to work out what the best structure for our blog is as we want each page to rank as highly as possible, we were looking at a flat structure similar to http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/ where every posts is after the blog/ but not in category's although the viewers can look in different category's from the top buttons on the page- photoshop - icons etc

or we where going to go for the structured way-  blog/photoshop/blog-post.html

the only problem is that we will end up 4 deep at least with this and at least 80 characters in the url.

any help would be appreciated.

Thanks Shaun

[crackingmedia]

Hi Shaun

I would definitely recommend a flat structure as you have suggested.

Your CMS (Wordpress?) may crete category / tag links but whilst they are useful for human visitors to browse blog posts around a subject, they are not great for search engines, so set them if possible as nofollow links.

I hope that helps,
Peter

[WhiteboardCreations]

Hey Shaun,

I wouldn't be so concerned with the length of the URL (see this Moz page outlining that URL length is second from the bottom in search ranking factors http://moz.com/search-ranking-factors according to 120 leading search marketers who participated) as you could put more efforts and time towards some of the other On-Page SEO items from the list to implement.

Just make sure your Categories, Archives and Tags from the blog are marked off as NoIndex/NoFollow. If you are using the All In One SEO plugin for WordPress (which I recommend), then you just have to check a couple boxes on the Settings page to accomplish this task to make the blog more SEO/search engine friendly.

Hope this was helpful! - Patrick