Best way to structure pages and categories for SEO & usability?

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on structuring a site in Concrete CMS and wanted to get some advice on best practices—especially from people who’ve built larger or content-heavy sites.

Right now, I’m trying to figure out the most effective way to organize content using:

  • Pages

  • Topics (categories/tags)

  • Page Lists

From what I understand, the forum itself is split into different areas like “Using Concrete / Help” and “Developing with Concrete,” which helps keep discussions organized . I’m trying to achieve something similar for my own site content.

My main questions are:

  1. Is it better to rely more on page hierarchy (parent/child pages) or on topics/categories for structuring content?

  2. For SEO purposes, should category pages be actual pages, or is using Topics enough?

  3. What’s the best way to avoid messy URLs or duplicate content when filtering via topics?

  4. Any recommended approach for scaling this cleanly as the site grows?

I’ve seen a few discussions where topics don’t always behave like traditional categories (especially when filtering or linking), so I want to make sure I’m not building something that becomes hard to manage later.

Would love to hear how others structure their projects and what’s worked well in real-world use.

Thanks in advance!