Originally Posted by chrishirst

None of them, all of them, any of them, pick which makes more sense from a site management point of view.

any where from a single character to a lot.

the URL has very very little weight, look at it from a REAL users point of view.

Yep, ditto that!

The only time a static url makes a difference is when it ends up in the search results. !0% or so of searchers use the url in determining if they will click through to your site from the SERP's.

I agree with Chrishirst.

I would go with this,

news/category/id-article-title.html

As urs is a news site having an dynamic id in URL would help u in getting into Google News as well.

As urs is a news site having an dynamic id in URL would help u in getting into Google News as well.

and you know this as a fact because ...

Originally Posted by david_john

I would go with this,

news/category/id-article-title.html

As urs is a news site having an dynamic id in URL would help u in getting into Google News as well.

Ok, firstly why would you go with that option? Just out of curiosity....

And also, whats all that about Google news? I've never seen any evidence of this

Actually...

From my own personal experience, and judging from the successful SEO's I have seen around... URL's can be very effective.

http://www.somebikesite.com/motorcycle-auctions/

that will definitely have more success than /category?id=1

However, from what I have experienced, it matters that the keywords aren't seperated by directorys / and are on one level.

For example, motorcycle/auctions would be poorer than motorcycle-auctions.

I know this quite strongly. But I started this thread just to confirm which one I first suggested would be best, but you, Chris, have insisted that any is ok as longs as it's built with user in mind, but from a real SEO perspective I have asked this question - but also please note all those urls are good for user.

From my own personal experience, and judging from the successful SEO's I have seen around... URL's can be very effective.

This is a mistake in assuming what you see is the reason. Just rewriting URLs is not the only thing that has been done in most cases.
Recoding the navigation to have less parameters or recoding/rewriting to static looking has only ONE real effect where SEs are concerned, it reduces / removes a potential crawling barrier.
BUT be warned rewriting URIs to remove all parameters will result in SEs removing the recovery delay between requests that is applied to database driven sites. And believe me, SE bots running at full speed can very easily swamp a site/database if your web server / database server isn't up to it.

Drawing from my experience, the general public don't even notice the URL. The only group of people who look at URIs to decide if it might be a "good" site are people like us. By "us" I mean the internet savvy / internet overloaded segment of humanity.
The vast majority of internet buyers / users out there have no idea what a URI looks like and care even less about whether it is keyworded or uses parameters.
Anchor text of links are what REAL users look at NOT the underlying url AND what SEs (Google especially) use to determine what the target page is about.

Sure, in terms of SEO it might not make a difference how the url is constructed, but surely using www.bikesite.net/oldbikes/reallyoldbike.htm is going to be better practice generally than www.bikesite.net/cat1/standard.php?pageid=43

...isn't it?

Not specially, both are equally Ok for search engines