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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

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.

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?

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?

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.

So I have a situation with the website I'm currently redesigning where the H1 titles are supposed to mix colors per the current brand strategy.

The branding crew is adamant that this has to be done so there is no use in saying "just don't do it".

To accomplish this I'm wrapping the words that need to be the other color in a .

Additionally, some pages have a "sub text" as part of the title, floated to the right and in a smaller font but with the same multi color treatment. I'm wondering if the sub text should be in an H2 and positioned to the right or if it would be beneficial to have the text in the H1 as well.

An example of what I'm talking about would be something like this: "Big Shoes for Big Guys - Nike Shoes"

In that, the "Big Shoes" and "Nike" would be one color and the "for Big Guys" and "Shoes" would be another. I can imagine having the "Nike Shoes" as part of the H1 would be a good idea in some respect but I'm not certain of that.

In order to make that happen I can only think of one way to do it:

-H1-
Big Shoes
-span- for Big Guys -/span-
-div- Nike
-span- Shoes -/span-
-/div-
-/H1-

So that brings me back to the original concern, do search engines care about tags inside the H1?

The only other way to accomplish the color changes that I can think of would be to have a fairly large chunk of javascript setup to go through H1's to colorize them using the span tags. That is unless GoogleBot has started to execute javascript while crawling the sites now...

We cannot market our product outside of residential use. I asked about that once before and I can't remember the details, I just remember that it's not an option. So we're restricted to individual consumers.

The other groups that I'm currently aware of would be groups interested in: then environment, child safety, redwood specifically, and child health. Not sure what else we could aim for. This has been gone over for the past three years now.

One of our competitors has links on their state government site having something to do with recycling. I've attempted to find something similar on our own state site but haven't had any luck yet.

But again, the root, I believe, of our problem is a lack of valuable text content on our pages. We're ranking #1 for a bunch of keyword phrases that are nice, but not widely searched. However, the pages that rank well are all pages that we have recently spent some time adding content to and are using those keywords well.

I can't help thinking that if we would fix the content issues with the site that we would be more "linkable" and would take care of this concern in the long run. Unfortunately they're looking for an instant fix which just doesn't exist.

Anyway, thanks for all the feedback and info!

Thanks for the response!

I've looked through our competitors link profiles and the main difference between us is that they more links. The source types (if not the sources themselves) are the same.

The product is swing sets (wooden playsets, the big ones with all the different extras like climbing walls, monkey bars, various slides, etc...). It's a big purchase item which means that the consumer wants the best deal. That's one of my reasons for thinking that not having pricing hurts us. But out competitors also don't show pricing either so maybe it isn't, who knows.

As for guest blogging and blogs in general, we attempted that once before but had a terrible time finding a relevant blog and then finding one that was willing to help us out. The main source for links for us and our competitors is news and PR. From what I've read those sources aren't the best anyway but so far we've not found any other solutions.

Our brand uses US redwood which has a big list of benefits including sustainability. So I've been trying to find ways to use that to generate links.

We've had brainstorming sessions repeatedly to figure out how to handle the link back issue. Every time I repeat that we need content, good and valuable content that is worth linking to. And every time they wave that away like it's stupid and come back with "there's gotta be something we can do to move up higher in the search results".

We're out of ideas for sources for links and now I'm to the point of considering that we help improve our dealer's SEO so they rank higher and get more authority in some hope that it will in turn improve our own.

We've had trouble with one of our brand websites for years now in SERP rankings.

When I first started working here 3 years ago I stated that the site lacks a content foundation to build on. A large number of our pages do not have proper text content or had duplicate content, there was no consideration of keyword usage in any title or body copy, and there was absolutely no reason for anyone to want to link to the site.

I'm not a copy writer so I've pushed to get one hired, if even just on a freelance basis, to at least get some kind of content on the pages that I could work our keywords into. I'm hoping that soon they will finally start listening to me and we'll get that content in place.

However, even with the content we have the problem of our market not having an impartial authority site that we could be linked from to help us build our own authority. The current authorities for our keywords are competitors. They've been doing a better job with their SEO and for a lot longer than us.

The nature of our business restricts us from displaying pricing on our site which I feel is another major strike against us when it comes to organic link backs. We do not sell direct, all of our sells are made through authorized dealers and each dealer has their own territory that does not compete with each other. Additionally we do not have a MSRP and even if we did our dealers would explode if we advertised it on the site since there is such a wide range of dealer pricing.

The only good thing we have going for our site currently is a new redesigned layout that makes it easier for users to navigate and get the information they need. I feel it is still to cluttered but I have to make the brand manager happy and that person insists on adding clutter that is not necessary.

Additionally we added a new tool to the website, a custom tool that uses javascript and canvas to allow visitors to build their own product and request a price from their local dealer.

The links we have to our site right now are from PR sites and sites that do not have any authority in regard to our target keywords. A while back we asked our dealers to help out by adding a link to our site from theirs. This was initiated by a third party company who had delusions of understanding SEO and so the links our dealers have work great for ranking us for our brand name but not so much in regard to the keywords we want to place for. Plus not every dealer is doing it.

Our top competitors have over 3x the links to their sites than we do so we have a lot of catching up to do in that respect. And when I look at the sites that are linking to them it's, again, news and PR sites mostly.

My line of thinking currently is to get our content issues under control and get all of our dealers linking to our site with properly constructed anchor text. I'm also trying to push to have more and more frequent press releases sent out to a wider range of sites than we currently target.

I want to submit the customizer tool we developed (6 months of work and improvements/additions to be done in the future, so we're kinda proud of it) to sites that like to link to such things but so far I've not been able to find any. I'm just not searching for the right thing to find them is my guess.

A few other ideas I've had is to reduce the page depth of many of our pages, mainly our product pages since they're 4 levels deep right now. I'm not sure if that's worthwhile though. How important is the url structure and keyword usage in them and how many levels should I try to keep from exceeding?

We have an infographic on our site that generated a few links, are things like that really worth the time and effort though? Would it be better to focus our attention on something else instead?

What I want to know is if my thinking is right and if there is anything else we should be doing that I haven't thought of yet. Or if I'm off base with all of this and we need to be focusing on something else entirely.

Thanks in advance for any help/insight!

So I have a situation with the website I'm currently redesigning where the H1 titles are supposed to mix colors per the current brand strategy.

The branding crew is adamant that this has to be done so there is no use in saying "just don't do it".

To accomplish this I'm wrapping the words that need to be the other color in a .

Additionally, some pages have a "sub text" as part of the title, floated to the right and in a smaller font but with the same multi color treatment. I'm wondering if the sub text should be in an H2 and positioned to the right or if it would be beneficial to have the text in the H1 as well.

An example of what I'm talking about would be something like this: "Big Shoes for Big Guys - Nike Shoes"

In that, the "Big Shoes" and "Nike" would be one color and the "for Big Guys" and "Shoes" would be another. I can imagine having the "Nike Shoes" as part of the H1 would be a good idea in some respect but I'm not certain of that.

In order to make that happen I can only think of one way to do it:

-H1-
Big Shoes
-span- for Big Guys -/span-
-div- Nike
-span- Shoes -/span-
-/div-
-/H1-

So that brings me back to the original concern, do search engines care about tags inside the H1?

The only other way to accomplish the color changes that I can think of would be to have a fairly large chunk of javascript setup to go through H1's to colorize them using the span tags. That is unless GoogleBot has started to execute javascript while crawling the sites now...