Ecommerce SEO URL Structure Questions

[WayneRooney]

| I am in the process of developing a new Magento ecommerce store. Take for instance this website is in the apparel industry and i have the following main categories.

1. Clothing
2. Shoes
3. Accessories
4. Beauty

Sub categories for clothing would be:

1. Dresses
2. Pants
3. jeans
4. Tops

Products would be:

1. Kelly Maxi dresses

What is the best SEO Structure for this?

Main categories obviously: www.example.com/clothing

Sub Categories:
www.example.com/clothing/dresses Or www.example.com/dresses (Zappos seem to pursue the second type)

Products:
www.example.com/clothing/dresses/kelly-maxi-dresses/ Or www.example.com/kelly-maxi-dresses ?

Which one would be the best way to structure your site? Also what about filters that available in category pages? Say if i were to filter  by color. what would be the best URL? I am sure canonical tag is needed here.

New to Ecommerce SEO so i need some guidance! |

[Asjad]

Please Read this  http://moz.com/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

it will help you.

[WayneRooney]

Would it create duplicated pages?

[Asjad]

Hello There,

I will Recommend you to have a Proper URL structure like you have mentioned above : www.example.com/clothing/dresses/kelly-maxi-dresses/

Just Add Color at the end of the url for any filter things.

This will tell your customer Clearly where He is Going to Land by just looking at the URL.

canonical : A canonical page is the preferred version of a set of pages with highly similar content. For more : https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139394?hl=en

Thanks

[WayneRooney]

What about SKU? Should i include SKU in the product pages?

What is your very best preferred method? Can you explain more about canonical? The correct way of doing it?

[FedeEinhorn]

I think the best structure would be the easier to read:

I'd personally use example.com/clothing -> example.com/dresses -> example.com/dresses-kelly-maxi (but this actually something you decide.. there's no golden rule to follow. If the content is good you can even have example.com?cat_id=5 and rank perfectly well).

In this case, there's no need to repeat "clothing" it is already understood when you say "dresses".

As for the filters, the best way is to use URL parameters, following the example above: example.com/dresses-kelly-maxi?sort-by=price&order=desc

Any possible combination of the filter should point to the page where all the options are listed "naturally". If by default example.com/dresses-kelly-maxi is sorted by date added, then the canonicals on any possible filter you offer should point to that page.

Hope that helps!