What is the optimal URL Structure for Internal Pages

[rarbel]

Is it more SEO friendly to have an internal page URL structure that reads like www.smithlawfirm.com/personal-injury/car-accidents or www.smithlawfirm.com/personal-injury-car-accidents? The former structure has the benefit of showing Google all the sub-categories under personal injury; the later the benefit of a flatter structure. Thanks

[RobertFisher]

Rafi, I handle a few law firms that are involved in PI. I will give you an example of a site that performs very well: Actos-Lawsuit.org. If you look at our url structure you will see two things, hyphens and flat. You are asking about the firm site I am assuming. Obviously, you don't want more than three steps to any page. Within that context, I still believe the flatter the better. To take something from someone else a few months back regarding hyphens, look at the url on the page you are now viewing and what do you see? My suggestion is yes for the keeping it flat and absolutely yes for hyphens. Hope this helps.

[oznappies]

Since you will most likely have more than one form of personal injury, it would make more sense for a site architecure point of view to use category/type model ie. personal-injury/car-accidents. There probably is not any ranking difference, except that you could have a personal-injury landing page that links to the injury types and gains link juice in it's own right.

[blu42media]

It's shouldn't matter either way... though I would strongly advise that you're organizing your content appropriately.  The directory structure will then build itself.  Slashes or dashes?  I would build it with the slashes.

Keep it human readable and you'll be in good shape

[RyanKent]

I agree with John and oznappies.

A logical category system is very useful for your site admins, users and SEO. There are many benefits to a simple /personal-injury/car-accidents design.

Sites need to be balanced. A structure that is overly deep with categories is not desired, but an overly flat structure where every page is a child of the home page isn't going to provide the best user experience either.

[vaibhav45]

Category wise structure is alwaz a better option.

If your site is small than you can keep all pages in root folder, but as your site grows it would be very difficult for you to manage all pages on root & google will treat all pages at same level

go for 1st option.

[KeriMorgret]

The URL structure can be helpful for analysis when looking at your analytics. See this post at LunaMetrics for reasons why you might want a directory structure. http://www.lunametrics.com/blog/2010/09/22/designing-google-analytics-friendly-site/

[rarbel]

Thanks, I had read this post before adding my question.