Hi! I'm wondering whether for keyword SEO - a url should be www.salshoes.com/shoes/mens/day-wear (so with a few parent categories) or www.salshoes.com/shoes-mens-day-wear is ok for on page optimization?

[SalSantaCruz]

Hi! I'm wondering whether for keyword SEO - a url should be www.salshoes.com/shoes/mens/day-wear (so with a few parent categories) or www.salshoes.com/shoes-mens-day-wear is ok for on page optimization?

Hi! I'm wondering whether for keyword SEO - a url should be www.salshoes.com/shoes/mens/day-wear (so with a few parent categories) or www.salshoes.com/shoes-mens-day-wear is ok for on page optimization?

[ClaytonJ]

Ideally you lead in big and get narrower - so your suggestion www.salshoes.com/shoes/mens/day-wear would be varied as follows:-

www.salshoes.com/mens/shoes/day-wear

Also it makes sense when you read, plus it is consistent with what a searcher may type into google. That said "day-wear" is a atypical keyword to target for shoes, so perhaps casual or formal may be preferable.  The more precise you can be the more optimum for SEO ie .  www.salshoes.com/mens/shoes/canvas-shoes

Hope that assists.  Ask if have any queries.

[_nitman]

Hi SalSantaCruz,

I would like to add something on top of what John Cross mentioned here. I would suggest the following URL for this particular use case:

www.salshoes.com/shoes/canvas, and will keep "Men" & "Women" as on page filters.

Reason: You'll probably be looking to target this page for "canvas shoes" which is high volume search term than "canvas shoes for men" or "canvas shoes for women" which can be considered as secondary keywords for this page. Now, having "Men" and "Women" as filters on this page, helps you avoiding cannibalization issues as well i.e the situation when many of your pages (www.salshoes.com/men/shoes/canvas, www.salshoes.com/women/shoes/canvas, www.salshoes.com/kids/shoes/canvas etc.) will be fighting for a click of a user searching for "canvas shoes".

P.S its always good to think about site architecture and all the edge cases while thinking about such meta level things. Here, considering "Men" and "Women" as a category or a filter matters a lot.

Hope this helps. Cheers!

[BrianJGomez]

I think this question depends on how many products you have, how many products you eventually want to grow to and what your keyword goals are. For example, if you have 5 specific products and don't want to expand to say more than 15 in the next 5 years, in my opinion, you don't need to use all the categories. Categories are for organizing data and/or targeting category kws. If there's not much data to organize and your long tail URLs efficiently target your kws ... then I would stick with that.

[_nitman]

Well said Brian. The solution I suggested was for a scalable system which is not dependent on the number of product. IMHO, one shouldn't think about 5-15 products while working on a project like URL structure even if you're planning to not scale that much.

P.S Thinking about a scalable solution won't hurt you anyways, it'll rather add value if you're planning to scale at any time.