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The mountain bike examples were just for illustration, the actual keywords are different than described but the principle is the same.

Actually I did use PPC research, and they pretty much bring up the same content (slight, very slight variations but in general they could be considered the exact same market segment )

So I guess other than splitting the results I will just grab the top performer that I think I have the best chance at getting good results with and maybe PPC the others if it makes economic sense.

Thanks for the answers.

The only problem with that  would be that all of the links would have to be on the home page, which I don't want.

I have a landing page, then a couple of searchable content categories/catalogs, similar to a blog structure ( excerpts to the full page )

Personally I like the flat structure better, but worry about losing out on points for not having an exact enough URL

I was going to add - between the words, is there a reason that more compact form (no - ) is better?

So the part that looks like it's phishing is the repetition of mountain bike adventures in the catalog section?

My thought was, and perhaps incorrectly that if someone searched for "Mountain Bike Adventures" then they would get the catalog page, but if something more specific the expanded page.

So to clarify you think that MountainBiking.com/adventures if all else on the page was optimized would work better than MountainBiking.com/Mountain Biking adventures/

Thanks for the help, really appreciate it.

So I have read on here that page URL Hiearchy is important. My question is from a search engine standpoint which of the following methods would be the best to use (or another if not listed)

COMPACT and naturally hierarchical

MountainBiking.com

MountainBiking.com/adventures ( a list of the pages below )

MountainBiking.com/adventures/in whistler (for each page)

MountainBiking.com/adventures/in utah

OR VERBOSE but reptetive

MountainBiking.com

MountainBiking.com/Mountain Biking adventures ( intro + a list of the pages below )

MountainBiking.com/Mountain Biking Adventures/Mounting Biking adventures in whistler

MountainBiking.com/Mountain Biking Adventures/Mountain Biking Adventures in Utah

It seemed like the blog I read suggested the compact form, but it seems to me that the verbose (though admittedly a bit clunky) seems better so far as exact keyword match etc.

Experience and or advice on this?

I am creating a new site and am looking for some advice on how to structure the site

Using Google's keyword search tool it seems like I have a dilemma in that about 50% of the keyword pairs are contained in 10 keyword pairs that are similar

The first two pairs have about 49% of the traffic and only differ between plural / singular, not quite sure how to handle that, or if google has a method to make these more or less synonomous

The last 8 pairs are roughly similar in distribtuion

As an example (not my case, just for visualization)

Mountain Bike Classes

Mountain Bike Instruction

Mountain Bike Workshops

Mountain Bike Training

Etc ... which all more or less give the same results (yes some difference but they all deal with learning how to ride a mountain bike, again this is not my exact case, don't care a whit about mountain bikes

I don't see giving each of those kinds of pairs their own page since the content would be pretty much the exact same, making it substantially different would also be problematic (if I am thinking about this correctly)

I have a clean slate to work with from a site perspective so I am wondering how people here would, or better yet have handled similar situations

I would hope that domain/key-word would rate as well as key-word.com etc. , it seems like they should, but it also seems like a lot of peopel think they are not.

I kind of buy into  the key-word.com being a bonus if for no other reason than it's a form of anchor text keywording on all incoming links.  That makes sense to me, but that does not mean it's correct.

I have also read the subdomains do not inherit the same magic as root domains on google, but you know what they say about opinions, and if its primarily a function of the key word being included in all links then domain - subdomain should not matter .

I was hoping someone had tried an experiement, I guess we will see what others say.

As to monkey fighting, it's the direct replacement to MMA, so don't nock it until you have tried it! ( for the humorless readers this is a joke, I do not sponsor, participate in, or condone cruelty to animals )

I have read here that domain names with keywords might add a boost to your search rank

For instance using a completely inane example monkey-fights.com might get a boost compared to mfl.com (monkey fighting league)  when searching for "monkey fights"

There seems to be a hot debate as to how much bonus the first domain might get over the second, but leaving that aside for the moment.

Question 1.

Would monkey-fights.mfl.com get the same kind of bonus as a root domain bonus?

Question 2.

If the answer to 1 above was yes would a 301 redirect from the suddomain URL to root domain URL retain that bonus

I was just thinking on how hard it is to get root domains these days that are not either being squatted on etc. and if this might be a way to get the same bonus, or maybe subdomains are less bonus prone and so it would be a waste of time

Thanks