Designing path structure - readability or keyword density

[HireSpace]

We are looking at redesigning our URL structure to accommodate our expansion. This gives us a  chance to change the path, but we have found conflicting advice on readability vs. keyword density.

These are our three options.

mywebsite.com/s/birmingham/restaurants  (Keep it short so that the keywords dominate the path)

or

mywebsite.com/search/birmingham/restaurants (Accurately describe the content on the page)

or

mywebsite.com/top/birmingham/restaurants  (Be a bit spammy and include a word often associated with our inbound searches)

Does anyone have any experience on what works best?

[HireSpace]

Thanks for all responses, extremely useful.

[kirube]

Hi -

Here in this case, it comes to readability.

All have, Birmingham and restaurants are the 2nd and 3rd level subfolder, so they have the same impact.

In my view, it should be as simple as site.com/restaurants/birmingham, where the restaurants your main identifier of the keyword is closer to TLD.

Zomato.com does it very good, you can checkout that as well to inspire yourself.

Also booking.com is to some extent good.

If have to choose between the 3, i'd go with the first one

K

[CommT]

Hi,

I think your first option is the best. This is why I think so:

• I like short URLs - they look nicer and are less likely to be miss-typed
• The word 'search' is not one of your keywords, so unnescessary in the url
• You're right that using 'top' could be a 'bit spammy' - Also, if people's search behaviour changes and they stop searching for 'Top ...' then you may come to regret putting all your eggs in that basket (as it were). I personally wouldn't take the risk.

If you do change the URLs, make sure you do proper 301 redirects from page to page (e.g. old Brirmingham Restaurant page should forward to the new version of it, NOT just the homepage). Also, submit your xml via WMT, and with any super-important pages you can use the Fetch as Google tool which allows you to submit the page to Google's index.

Good luck with your site overhaul!

Amelia