Permalink Structure - The best approach

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

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  Tim Capper: Personally i would do / state / city / category - and not have country within structure.
  
  If you do use more countries then site should automatically pick up country based on user ip - or allow them to select
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  Ryan Logan: Appreciate the response. I like the idea of leaving "country" off.
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  Jenny Halasz: Tim Capper don’t use ip detection! There’s another thread in here somewhere about that...
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  Benj Arriola: Generally I would treat folders similar to your navigational menus and your breadcrumbs and is planned out in the very beginning as part of your site information architecture.
  
  My overall rule is from general to specific, the deeper you go, the more specific it gets, and if ever you would be jumping around, you would be jumping around the specific areas or the deeper end of it.
  
  I assume people looking for businesses would not be jumping around looking for business of the same kind in different countries, instead it would be people will be looking at different businesses within their own country, thus the deeper end is the categories.
  
  So I prefer this:
  
  /country/state/city/category/business-listing
  
  Over this:
  
  /category/country/state/city/business-listing
  
  Someone may argue there might be users that will be jumping around countries and staying in one category like looking for a plumber to fix all my hotels in different countries but I think that is very very rare.
  
  I think I would find more people staying in one country looking for a plumber, a carpenter, and electrician for a house in the same country and probably even in the same city.
  
  Now that whole reasoning I had was from a user point of view.
  
  Now from an SEO point of view, site architecture also helps out. People search specific longtail keyword and some search general head terms. Head terms being more general are ideal in the more higher levels of your site architecture and the longtails, being more specific target the deeper pages of the site architecture.
  
  And the deeper you get, is a way to narrow down the topic of the page.
  
  And for the deepest long tails, I believe people search more of plumbers in San Diego, CA, USA than people searching for countries that have plumbers.
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  Ryan Logan: Benj Arriola Thanks for the detailed response. Makes perfect sense.