Categories and Pagenames

[FrozenSandSpur]

Quick question from a relative newb:

I have a client using our website management product for eCommerce. She sells Canes, walking-sticks, and accessories, and the categories in the catalog are in the ugly format of "www.domain.com/product_list.asp?cid=4", where 4 is the category. Using a custom 404, I'm masking that as "www.domain.com/Canes/Decorative/product-list.html", where decorative is the subcat of Canes.

Since she has 3 major categories of products, and only one (Canes) has subcategories, which of the following would be best?

1)

http://www.domain.com/Canes/Subcateg...duct-list.html
www.domain.com/Walking-Sticks/product-list.html
www.domain.com/Shepherd-Crooks/product-list.html

2)

www.domain.com/Canes/decorative-canes.html
http://www.domain.com/Walking-Sticks...ng-sticks.html
http://www.domain.com/Shepherd-Crook...rd-crooks.html


The second option puts more keywords in the URL, but seems a bit redundant. However, it means not using "product-list.html" as the page name. I did some searching in the engines, and "catalog" is used a bit by the competition, so I'm not sure whether I should go with option 1 using /Cat/Subcat/catalog.html

Thanks,

-Jeff

[Webby]

I'd go for 2 everytime. The reason is direct links (no link text just the url) to any of these pages will automatically result in the keywords in the anchor text. There is perhaps a boost for it being in the url although this has yet to be proven.