When Key Words make lousy content?

if you sell to many locations and people searc that way, what strategy?

[Cam_Morton]

My client's logs suggest that worthwhile keyword combinations would include locations (e.g. "flowers Toronto" or "gift delivery Albuquerque). Although he is focussed on serving the Canadian market, even that makes for a long list of cities and some pretty uninspiring mainpage copy. I can put them in meta tags but concensus in this and other SEO discussions seems to be that meta tags need to be reinforced by visible copy to have much effect. I'm thinking about a doorway page (whose address would only be reached through use of search engines and/or directories) which says something like this:
If you are looking for flower delivery
in any of the Canadian cities listed below,
your search has brought you to the right
place. In fact, you can safely ignore the
list ... it's here to help your search
engine do the job you want it to.
Now that that's accomplished, please click
here so we can show you our stuff
(followed by a list of cities, towns,
provinces in a small but legible font)

Comments? Suggestions? This approach amounts to cloaking I guess, so can anyone recommend a workaround?
Cam Morton

[JamesR]

Yeah I have noticed the same thing. However, not many other sites are probably using word combos in that order so that gives you the advantage. As long as your page has those words, I think if you put those odd combos in alt tags and the meta keyword tag, you will be OK. The content will match, it just won't be in the same order.

Also, check out Google's returns for some of the searches. Pay attention to the ransom note descriptions in the SERPs and you can get a feel for how Google matches word combos.

[Cam_Morton]

James you just jumped way over my head.
"ransom note descriptions in the SERPs"
which is to say?? :-)

[NFFC]

<pssst>Keep this to yourself Cam, [searchengineworld.com...] maybe ransom note will get added </pssst>

[john316]

>>My client's logs suggest that worthwhile keyword combinations<<

The operative word here is *worthwhile*, if those searches generate profit, you may as well break out new pages for each city and link to them from the "main " page. Most visitors will never see the home page anyway...they find the site, go the order page and you are done, the trick is letting them find the page (you know, the one with city info) ;).