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[AlanBleiweiss]

Thanks Simon.  I totally agree with you about visitor experience - it's ultimately the most important factor and I failed to mention it.

[SimonCullum]

That's a superb answer from Alan.

The only thing I'd add is to also consider what the most logical and easily navigatable structure is for your website's visitors, which will likely be one of Alan's suggestions for your structure anyway as they are logical suggestions. Just make sure that you're chosen option caters well for your visitors as well as for Search.

Regards

Simon

[AlanBleiweiss]

The structure of the URLs chosen would be based upon your desired outcome is regarding what your site is associated with.

So if you want to become recognized eventually as an authority source for the brands you carry, and that is more important than being recognized as an authority for the types of products you offer (categories), or even the individual products, then you would include the brands in that structure.

widget.com/brand/ (the main index of products within that brand)

widget.com/brand/product-name/

widget.com/brand/product-name2/

etc.

These URLs communicate that "all of these products are part of the larger group of "brand".

Alternately

widget.com/category/ (the main index of products within that category)

widget.com/category/product-name/

widget.com/category.product-name2/

these URLS communicate that you've got x pages "within" the "category" section, giving more strength to that category.

Part of the decision also has to do with how much you can apply (time. resources) to getting off-site confirmation that each highest level brand category page is an important page because a key to SEO in 2011 and beyond depends on building citations and links around and pointing to those individual pages.

Alternately, if you just want to go with widget.com/product-name/ then you'd need to get that external effort to point to and reference each of those product pages, so the more products you have, the more difficult it would be to get the same amount of external confirmation for.

And if you have a lot of products, it takes less effort to group the URLs by brand or category and focus on building authority for those brand and category pages than it does all the multiples of individual product pages.