A question about how to construct a good url structure for SEO

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions G+ community.

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  Simon Fryer: Hi  ;<br /><br />I don&#39;t think that any of the approaches you&#39;ve mentioned are going to raise &#39;spam&#39; flags with Google. ;<br /><br />That said I wouldn&#39;t go down the directory route unless you&#39;re targeting a large number of locations and don&#39;t have a fixed address in each one.<br /><br />Ex.1 or ex.2 would both be fine. Some would say ex.2 is better but I believe that the impact is minimal, and prefer not to use locations in URLs. Instead I&#39;d focus on other ways to establish the locale. ;<br /><br />The only real benefit of getting your locations in the URL is some very slightly bolded text in the SERPs.<br /><br />Search engines - well....Google - are beginning to understand businesses as a whole, rather than just evaluating results at a single webpage level. ;
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  William Gomes: what he said. ;-) 
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  Ranu Jain: Yes John, I too would suggest that don&#39;t include the geographic location in the URLs. You can always rank in those areas by doing local SEO. ;You can simply add the services name in the URLs.  ;<br /><br />If you really want to add the location then I would suggest to have different pages for different location under service 1and so on. As your main focus is on just two towns, it won&#39;t be a tedious job for you.<br /><br />For ex:  ;service1/town1.html (folder level structure)<br />service1/town2.html<br /><br />It will definitely help you in ranking as you will have separate page with location specific keywords and content. ;
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  John Pitcher: Many thanks all; my instinct was to move away from the servicea-town1-town2.html type of url (in case it gets frowned upon at some stage in the future) but wasn&#39;t sure if I was &quot;missing a trick&quot; by doing this.<br /> ;Many thanks for your assessment that the impact is minimal; having just used the Yoast SEO Wordpress plugin (for another site) where it flags up when your keywords are not in the url, I thought I&#39;d double-check.<br />Thanks Ranu Jain for your suggestion of rearranging the directories; service/town is probably better that town/service.
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  W.E. Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 01:48:01 into the YouTube video: