Sub domains and friendly URL's

[Golf_Dude]

We're concernecd with the current user performance of our key landing pages and are wanting to change the content/functionality to improve conversion. Our site is only 6 months old and even though we can see all these pages are indexed, their performance in this area is still pretty negligable too.

However, it is our intention to get these pages working well in search engines and we're unsure whether our current URL structure approach is the right one - so should we try and change both of these elements together?

For example our current URL structure for the landing pages is -

www.mywebsite.co.uk/my-destination.php

But would one of the following 2 options be a better solution and if so which one is better of the 2?

Option 1 - www.mywebsite.co.uk/my-destination/

Options 2 - www.my-destination.mywebsite.co.uk

If it is recommended that we change the URL structure to one of the 2 options, should we keep the original existing pages live until the new (structure) pages get indexed, and then once the new pages are indexed we re-direct (i.e. 301 or 302 redirect) the old pages to the new pages, or would this approach be deemed as duplicate content/spam?

Some help on this topic would be greatly appreciated.

[bill]

Option #1 would give you some good future proofing for your pages if you decide to use something other than PHP for your pages down the line.

Option #2 would probably get you in trouble. Sub-domains are considered separate domains. I don't think that's what you want to do.

However, you may want to keep in mind what the W3C says about URIs, "Cool URIs don't change [w3.org]". They've got some good reasoning for not changing addresses once you've published something. If that change can't be avoided a 301 redirect would probably be best.

I don't think changing your URL structure will make much difference either way.

[tapher]

I agree with Bill that there's no remarkable change between Sub-domain & Folder structure.
Of course the nearer the better for spiders to crawl & index keywords in your page URL. But, again Bill is right, sub-domains are considered as isolated domains that need an acceptable number of link popularity. Thus it's harder to get link popularity for 2 separate domains.
Also keyword density gets little weigh in GG ranking algorithm.
For these reason I think the option 1 is better for your site. At the moment.

[Golf_Dude]

Hi Bill/Tapher,

Many thanks for your feedback, think i'm going to stick with what i currently have and simply tweek the content on the exisiting stucture to continue to improve our user experience...some pages are already performing in search engines so best to be patient and give it more time for the others to perform as well.