: URL formatting for a project I'm currently in the process of developing a website for a client, and we're having disagreement on the url format for the site. I am recommending he do a format

@Angie530

Sorry for the late answer, but I hope this still helps you or someone.

The reasoning is simple, <brandName> is a dynamic URL slug, brand is a static URL slug.

When a slug is dynamic then all the slugs are expected to identify some dynamic resource, for example your brand, when a slug is static then it specifies a section/category/slice of the site.

Let me give you a practical example using his format:
example.com/<brandName>

Means you can have urls like
example.com/google http://example.com/yahoo example.com/bing

But you loose control of the first slug, you can no longer have
example.com/<categoryName>/

Because what if you have a category and a brand called "Bing"?
example.com/bing/

Is this a category or a brand?
It might not be likely in your case, but it is a sign of bad design (Unless you only have brands on your site).

With your way there is no possibility for such confusion
example.com/category/bing/ http://example.com/brand/bing/


It also slices the website into parts, this usually gives way for server server optimizations as you can reduce the amount of resources to be loaded by checking the static slug.

Keep in mind, URL's should never change so it is better to make them completely future proof.

If he is still not convinced just have him look at the stackexchange URL format
webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/<questionID>/<dash-separated-keywords>

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@Candy875

The advantage of the your recommendation is that it tells the user "we organise our site in two ways, by brand and by category". It also prevents confusion if (depending just on what you're selling) brands and categories have similar or identical names.

It also lets you create a page at siteroot/brand which contains a list of brands, and similarly with categories. If people are having trouble finding what they want then they can go to those pages and get an overview of what's available.

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@Angela700

Matt Cutts and Yoast go over the best practices for URL structures on this page which includes two videos from Matt Cutts at Google yoast.com/wordpress-seo-url-permalink/

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