SEO - which URL's are the best?

Question

In my application I have users who can post offers. An offer belongs to a category and a subcategory. The title of the offer can be long (~80 characters)

My options to have url's uniqueness, are:

i) /users/:id/offer/:title

ii) /category/:name/offer/:title-:number

iii) /category/:name/subcategory/:name/offer/:title-:number

where, :number is a different identifier if there are 2 offers with the same title

1) Which of the 3 is the best in terms of SEO (or there is another combination that is better than the 3 options)?

2) Is there any difference on the order of the words? For example, is there any difference if I choose /users/:id/offer/:title instead of /offer/:title-:number

Answer 1

Category 3 seems to be the best as it clearly shows the search terms and google can better relate it to search queries

Answer 2

Yes there is a difference. If the categories are what you are trying to rank for I would do:

/category/sub-category/offer-number

Adding the person's name is the tricky part - depending on your site - it may be a good idea to have it first like:

/name/category/sub-category/offer-number

Because it creates a "hackable" URL your end users could use to identify other deals the provider has.

I'm not really sure what the difference is in title and offer, but I'd merge the two if possible.