Nouns as FILENAMES: singar or plural form?

Question

Dear folks, two scenarios where FILE_NAMES.PHP should be best representing the audiences searching for it.

/poster.php
/design.php

OR

/posters.php
/designs.php

Q1. What do you intuitivly think would be the best of these two?
Q2. What do the facts in general show? people search for singular or plural in search?
Q3. Do Search engines have common rule of thumb for this?
Q4. Should I pick either and go with either scenario consistently or does it depend on the word?

Thanks very much for your ideas/suggestions. I reall don't know which one to go for.

Answer 1

Try not to think of it in terms of search engines. Instead consider it from a usability perspective. (Keep in mind search engines do take into account the bounce rate)

The goal should be that the url should portray what the destination will be about. If there are multiple posters then you should go with posters.php

Granted, the page title, description comes into play. One of my most recent projects was a custom built CMS where instead of having mysite.com/what-ever-url-slug-here I decided to make it prettier. So the result was mysite.com/What-Ever-URL-Slug-Here

When the site pops up in the result, it looks very clean and it's easy for the users to read. So far my bounce rate has been lower than most of my other sites in the same niche.

So in conclusion my point is, go with filename which best describes the content on the destination page and keep it as clean in terms of readability.