Keywords in url - specific case question

[EscaladeSports]

There are a bunch of questions about keywords in the url and so far what I've gathered is that it's good to have them but keep it simple so it doesn't look stuffed.

I'm working on redesigning some sites that were originally setup by a group who had no understanding of SEO (or perhaps I should say a misunderstanding) and spent a lot of time stuffing keywords EVERYWHERE. In some cases they weren't too far off but in others I think they just went overboard.

One of the areas I'm trying to fix are the paths which leads to the following concerns.

One of the sites has a basketball section and through the use of the Adwords keyword tool they determined that most people are searching for "basketball hoops".

My first question is, how reliable are the monthly search numbers in the Adwords keyword tool? Are they accurate enough to warrant forming keyword strategies based on the results?

As it relates to the url issue, the current tree for the basketball section of the site looks like this:

1. /basketball (the landing page for the whole section, there are other sport specific pages as well)
2. /basketball/hoops (goes nowhere. not sure why they didn't just go to /basketball-hoops/x for other pages)
3. /basketball/hoops/72in-backboards (the systems are split into three different backboard sizes, these pages group them onto one overview page per size)
4. /basketball/hoops/72in-backboards/specific-basketball-goal (the actual basketball goal details page with options to buy and such)

So what I'm wondering about this setup is:

1. does having /basketball/hoops take care of having the "basketball hoops" search term or would it be more effective to switch to /basketball-hoops?
2. If it's fine to leave it at /basketball/hoops, do you think it would be beneficial to create an actual page for that path? We found that actually more people search for "basketball basket" than "basketball hoops" so maybe that would be a good page to try to make use of that term and explain maybe why people think "basket" instead of "hoop" and why we call ours "goals" or something.

I tend to navigate pages by deleting path arguments and I hate when I land on a nonexistent path so I'm leaning toward changing the paths but just don't know if it's worth it at this point.

Additionally, on one of the other sites, we have a domain that is the main keyword we want to rank for: swingsets.com

The other company I mentioned then decided to put all of the product pages under: swingsets.com/swing-sets/{category}/{set-height}-{'swing-set'|'playset'|'swingsets'|'play-set'|etc...}/combo{#}

So that comes out to look something like this: swingsets.com/swing-sets/outback/5ft-playsets/combo2

I've never liked that path setup. It looks stuffed to me, especially once they start using '5ft-swing-sets' and '6ft-play-set' on other product pages. It's inconsistent which is another issue I have since I tend to surf by path.

Another issue with that setup is the final argument of combo{#} but there's nothing I can really do about that because they call the products out as combinations. The only actual product name is the "outback" part.

I've been trying to come up with a better path setup for a long time now but again I'm concerned that I may just be wasting my time. The only thing I did do was make the height section consistently {height}-playsets. Is that good enough or should these paths remove /swing-sets from the beginning?

The actual /swing-sets page is a good and valuable landing page but then I'm not sure if it remains valuable to keep it in the paths for the product pages afterward.

Any insight into this dilemma would be appreciated. I've been stewing over this for a long time and my reasoning always becomes circular since I can see plenty of reasons for keeping them the way they are and simplifying them.

[WesleySmits]

It's indeed not something people would look for..

Very difficult problem you have there, at least it's good that you're making changes to it.
Don't forget to set a 301 redirect to the new page on any page you delete and if there is no new page then to the most relevant or the home page.

From what you told me i don't think it is an option to rebuild the entire site. The structure which is now there is way too difficult to change as much as it should in order for the best results.

The swingset website doesn't have very big descriptions either. I think you can make some good improvements on that area at least. There is one webshop in particular which i always use as a reference for how much content you should have on a product and that is vat19.com.

Not only is their marketing strategy perfect for their target audience. They offer so much information about their products. Images, text, specifications and video.

I hope i helped you at all with your problems and if you have any other questions or need more advice or a brainstorm partner let me know either in this thread (if it's relevant) or in a new thread (the you could send me a private message to let me know where to find it :)) or you could of course send me a private message directly, but then other people couldn't benefit from the problems and solutions we found.

Good luck with .. well everything

[EscaladeSports]

For basketball, yes, definitely. I'm actually in the process of changing them over on the dev site right now. Going to go with /basketball-hoops for the basketball pages. Just makes more sense.

As for swing sets, we have two main categories, outback and playhouse. Those two categories have a sub category that appends XL to the category name (such as outback-xl). Each category has combos 1 thru 5 and sometimes multiple or none of a combo (meaning you could have combo1, combo2, combo2-2, combo2-3, combo4 but no combo5).

I think the last time I did a count there were something like over 200 specific product combo pages. If we used AJAX it would reduce the actual pages to 12 (4 categories (including xl) and 3 heights per category). We have content issues with that site like you wouldn't believe and doing that would go a long way to fixing part of that problem but then it creates another even larger set of problems.

I think as a first step we will definitely eliminate /swing-sets from the paths of our product pages, though we'll need to keep the swing set overview page at /swing-sets. So once someone visits the overview page at swingsets.com/swing-sets, the sub pages would be at swingsets.com/category instead of swingsets.com/swing-sets/category.

Not sure there is really anything that we can do about the rest of the url though.

One thought I have after looking at your suggestion would be to go from swingsets.com/outback/5ft-playset/combo2 to swingsets.com/outback-5ft-playset/combo2

But again, I'm not sure if that makes any difference. I don't think anyone is searching for "outback" in terms of looking for a wooden swing set so I don't think we'd really benefit any by changing the / to a - in this case.

Actually, I just used the Adwords keyword tool to see and found that no one is searching for any iteration of {height} {playsets|play sets|swingsets|swing sets} so I don't think having that in the url helps any at all. Maybe having "playset" does but compared to all of the other SEO issues with that site I think it may not be worth worrying over.

So maybe swingsets.com/outback-5ft/combo2 would be just as useful. I think that's easier to remember. We do have landing pages for outback and playhouse but I'm not sure that should matter when making the path to the products. I think /outback-5ft looks better than /outback/5ft

[WesleySmits]

That does make the situation quite difficult.
Are there a lot of different combinations possible?

You could create a product page for every combination. This way your dealers can still direct the phone customers to the appropriate URL and you would still have a clean URL structure. For example: www.domain.com/category/outback-5ft-playset.

This still isn't perfect but as far as i can see it's the best option given the weird circumstances.

Hmm, all links are pointing to the home page with the brand name. That doesn't seem like a natural link profile and that is something which could get penalised.

But one problem at a time. Do you think the URL structure suggestion i provided will work?

[EscaladeSports]

No that was perfectly understandable.

From looking at our link profile, every single link we have to our site is to the home page and use our brand name as the anchor text, which explains a few other concerns I had about this particular site...

On the topic of AJAX, I had been considering, with the other site (swingsets.com), just getting rid of the "comboX" argument entirely and making the /outback/5ft-playset page use AJAX to load the different combos. Figured I could use a hash to make the page load a specific combos when first visited.

The concern I have with doing that is that our dealers use our site a lot to direct phone customers which means I'd still have to have links to each combo on the site. That makes me wonder if it wouldn't be a pain in the ass for users to remember a url (not that it's easy right now...) or if Google would ignore the # and think I have 200+ internal links split between 6 pages.

No matter what I do to the URL, there must be a specific "page" for each combination.

[WesleySmits]

I think you would benefit from it because it removes difficulty from the URL. Furthermore you will get found better on 'basketball hoops' instead of on 'basketball' and 'hoops'. (Minimal difference though).

Just think about the user experience mostly. Keep the URL's as short and readable as possible. That you have to make combinations could be done on a single page with some AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript and XML)  instead of doing it on multiple pages.

That way your URL structure would be cleaner and the user experience would be enhanced. Furthermore you remove the possibility that people are linking to multiple URL's like now. So you will have more links to a single page and that will improve your ranking.

Was anything unclear?

[EscaladeSports]

That would only apply if there are links to the non-page /basketball/hoops, right?

So if the links are only for /basketball and there are none for /basketball/hoops we wouldn't really benefit from a change to basketball-hoops?

[WesleySmits]

Well, if there are links pointing to /basketball and there are also links pointing to /basketball/hoops then you would rank better on /basketball-hoops. Because of the redirects from the two old URL's to the one new URL you are creating a page which get more links. As long as the content on the page is of decent quality of course.

If you stick to the structure: www.domain.com/basketball-hoops/72in-backboard then the plural word is not a problem because it is the category name.

It would be awesome if they did that except that a lot of people would misuse it and SEO would be one giant scam (as it used to be with the meta keywords tag and cloaking and so).

[EscaladeSports]

Thanks for the response.

So does that mean that the path /basketball-hoops would rank better than /basketball/hoops?

One of my major concerns about the whole thing is just how much impact the keywords have in the url. I figure it doesn't come close to comparing to using them in the page title, H1 title and page content in terms of determining what the page ranks for, but just how much impact does it make when they are in the url as well?

I've considered dropping /hoops from the path and appending -basketball-hoops to the product name (/basketball/72in-backboard/dc72e1-basketball-hoops) but my two main concerns are: it seems odd to refer to a page about a single product using a plural word (feels forced), and we're back to having a long url that may not make any difference with or without the added keyword text.

Wouldn't it be awesome if Google would provide importance values to things like this that we could see?

[WesleySmits]

If you can create a really good page for the basketball/hoops, then make a really good page for that.
If you can't create something good for that then you should change it to basketball-hoop. It will take care of being found on the query 'basketball hoops'.

You should take a look at how many links are pointing to /basketball and /basketball/hoops. Make sure you set 301 redirects if you change the URL structure.

The second website path is a little more difficult.
swingsets.com/swingsets? That is what i would call stuffing + users don't like long urls.

If it's possible try to stick to the following structure: www.domain.com/category/product-name.
I know it's difficult since you are doing something with combinations.

I'll think about it some more and if i come up with something i'll let you know.
Hope i was remotely helpful at this moment.