Which is the better directory structure from and SEO point of view?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions G+ community.

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  Janna Maica Feliciano: Either 1st or 2nd for a clean look :)<br />But it depends on your site&#39;s main topic. Which should come first in your URL: Region Name or the Subcategory?
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  Kate Toon: Yeah well for this client both are important. so for example &#39;wedding venues newcastle&#39; is the phrase they want to rank for. Should they use &#39;Newcastle&#39; for the folder name, or &#39;wedding venues&#39;? Or neither and just call the page &#39;wedding-venues-newcastle&#39;
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  Janna Maica Feliciano: Assuming that the site provides various wedding services other than wedding venues to several regions in Australia then you may consider:<br /><br /><br /><br />Regarding the target phrase &#39;wedding venues Newcastle&#39;, you can still rank with that even if you don&#39;t put them as is in domain URL. The more important is having a clean URL pattern. You can just include the keyword within the page content.
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  Kate Toon: yep agreed. Just wanted someone to affirm my thinking! Thanks  ;
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  Janna Maica Feliciano: glad to help :)
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  Philip Crothers: Yeah, we went with something similar to Janna&#39;s suggestion with area first then service. <br /><br />One thing to watch out for if you&#39;re going to have multiple levels of services is not to have a keyword in the top and bottom level categories:<br /><br />region/service-keyword/service-keyword-niche <br />
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  Tony McCreath: I always consider 2 things:<br /><br />If I have a folder structure then the folder only url should have content that makes sense.<br /><br />So if you go with /region/service then /region/ should make sense and have valid content.<br /><br />The other concern is duplication. This relates more to products and their categories. If products can be in multiple categories and your url structure is /category/product then you will have to deal with possible duplication issues. If you repeat the same services copy over multiple regions you will have the same problem.<br /><br />Bonus consideration is that Google has a patent mentioning folder structures so it maybe a signal they use.
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  W.E. Jonk: From the expert panel in this weeks SEO Questions hangout on air on 01:52:28 into the YouTube video: