ZydoSEO - 4:53 pm on Jan 26, 2013 (gmt 0)

My experience is that it is much easier to get 2 separate pages to each rank for a different keyword phrase (e.g. one for sales and second for rentals) than it is to get one page to rank for two phrases (sales and rentals).

As goodroi pointed out, it's not your folder structure that determines how deep an inner page is within the site. It's your navigational and other internal linking structures.

Personally, I think that in most cases... having separate pages for "<widget> sales" and "<widget> rentals" is a much better user experience. The information a users is looking for regarding "<widget> sales" is typically different than the information that they are seeking regarding "<widget> rentals". No reason your navigation can't have a link to both the sales and rental pages even though they are on different levels in your directory structure.

As an added SEO benefit, the content of each page can be more focused on one topic (either sales or rentals) and you get a whole set of on-page elements (title, meta descriptions, h1, h2s, etc.) that you can dedicate to EITHER sales or rentals rather than having to use a single set of on-page elements for a single page to target BOTH sales and rentals. It's been my experience that the latter is much less effective from an SEO perspective.