When it comes to formatting URL's, I think it's important for the URL's to make as much sense as possible from a hierarchical stand point. Moz has a really good article on the optimal URL structure. So you can sort of think of the blog keyword as the subcategory keyword from the example in that article.

Further more, look at how both moz and Matt Cutts structure their blog URL's.

http://moz.com/blog

https://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization/

Hope that helps!

That's very helpful. And that article was a good read. Appreciate the help!

One thing I kind of left out is that on my home page (index.htlm) my canonical is just set to www.mysite.com, and the redirect is just to redirect non-www request to www request. So I just wasn't sure if I should remove that canonical since the redirect is already taking care of it? Both the canonical and the redirect have been there for approximately about 2 years so the redirect already kicked in a long time ago.

I don't think that leaving the canonical there would devalue the page at all, but just want to get another opinion.

I've been reading through a few of blog posts here on moz and can't seem to find the answer to these two questions:

How long should I leave an existing page up after a 301 redirect? The page old page is no longer needed but has pretty high page authority. If I take the old page down—the one that I'm redirecting from—immediately after I set up the 301 redirect, will link juice still be passed to the new page?

My second question is, right now, on my index.html page I have both a 301 redirect and a rel canonical tag in the head. They were both put in place to redirect and pass link equity respectively. I did this a couple years back after someone recommended that I do both just to be safe, but from what I've gathered reading the articles here on moz is that your supposed to pick one or the other depending on whether or not it's permanent.

Should I remove the rel conanical tag or would it be better to just leave it be?

I just got a new client today and his entire website layout and structure is using tables instead of divs.

This client is on a tight budget and wants to avoid unnecessary hours for re-coding the website, but at the same time he wants me to improve his SEO organically. This is the first time I've been asked to do work on an existing website that uses pure tables for the entire layout and I'm wondering if this effects the SEO in any way. So my question is, will tables effect rankings and SEO in any way?