Url lenght/depth - Short or specific?

[Daniele_Carollo]

Hi,

I'm trying to decide the best structure for a directory my site offers (containing all the businesses working in the field) and I'm not sure whether to choose something shorter or being more specific.

So, I have 3 variables:

• Type of business (I mean, specific sector)
• Region
• City

And I'd like to give some strength to every one of it. So, the complete URL (the one I'd like to use) could be:

www.mysite.com/sector/region/city/business-name

What I was not sure about is...is that too deep? I mean, even thought I'd like to perfectly categorize them and give some strength to every sublevel, I'm not sure about having the business-name so "far" and so "deep".

Thank you for your ideas!

[Zippy-Bungle]

I'd try and get some data on this to inform my decision

Most sectors will have multiple variations on their name. Use google keyword tool to help you identify all these. Then use excel to generate a list of all your sector variants + region and your sector variants + city. Then look at the data and see which is going to give you the search volume and proceed that way.

It may be that you will have to add in city and village as well. I imagine florists are often searched for on a very local basis whilst chemical plants are often searched for on a national basis.

Psychologically we prefer a simpler taxonomy - but so do your competitors. If a more complex taxonomy justifies the complexity and delivers the additional traffic......

[Lumina]

Ah, if you have a searching feature, then having the full URL as you'd originally suggested would probably be best. Longer URLs aren't inherently bad, so long as the actual content of that page is specific enough - which it sounds like it would be in this case.

[Daniele_Carollo]

Thank you for your ideas.

Removing the "region" has been also one of those things I'm thinking about.

However, I got an internal search engine which gives the possibility to filter all the businesses for a region (as maybe u could expect). If I choose not to put the "region" in the complete URL, what should I show when someone makes that search? A simple /sector/region treating it as a city? Which I guess could be ok anyyway.

[Lumina]

I think that's fine - typically, the more specific the content of a page, the more specific (longer) a URL should be to it. I think that's a fine way of doing it, though if you want to compromise length and specificity, you could always remove the "region" section and use sector/city/business-name.

Another option would be to add 301 redirects and **rewrites **so that while the actual URL will be as long, the way it looks is shorter. That might be an option to consider if you're concerned with the aesthetic and not the functionality.

Hope that helps!