lucy24 - 9:24 pm on Jul 15, 2011 (gmt 0)

with a server load perspective; better off being direct instead of having .com/keyword/ correct?

I think your post overlapped g1 because I am tolerably certain he would have said to refer to the Index file as
/keyword/
rather than write it out explicitly as
/keyword/index.whatever

The reason is probably buried in the Apache docs somewhere.