New pages for different locations?

Is it possible without being penalised for duplication

[reddevil]

Please could somebody give me some tips on the best way to organise pages and navigation that have more or less the same content for different geographical locations.

I am trying to rent my holiday villa in "small Town" and my thinking is that anybody who has NOT heard of "small Town" or even the next "big Town", may actually search for "vacation in big Area" and might reach my "big Area" page and then hopefully be interested enough to click on my main selling point, the "small Town" page. Did I explain that correctly?

So I could optimise my main page for "vacation in small Town", but it would also be beneficial to optimise different pages for

"vacation in another small Town next to small Town".
"vacation in big Town"
"vacation in big City"
"vacation in big Area"
"vacation in Country"

But I think there could be too much duplication if I set up a different page for each of these 6 different geographical regions and would look spammy? I mean, then I could also have 6 different pages for "car hire in.........", then 6 different pages for "sports activities in........" etc etc

What do you think is the best way of handling this without having too much duplication and upsetting the search engines or looking spammy to my visitors?

[Beagle]

Just some thoughts--I don't see any problem with optimizing different pages for the different locations, and IMHO you could have good, varied content on each page. If I were thinking of vacationing in Small Town, I'd also want to know what I could find to do in nearby Big City, and even what I could see in Big Area. So even though I might enter the site on the "Vacation in Small Town" page, I'd also want to see "Vacation in Big City" and "Vacation in Big Area" pages. OTOH, if I'd never heard of Small Town and entered the site on the "Vacation in Big Area" or "Vacation in Country" page, I'd probably be interested in information about Big City--and, if I didn't want to stay in Big City, in information about accommodations in nearby small towns.

When you're writing copy, you'd need to keep in mind that any page on the site might be the first page someone sees--but that's always true, isn't it?

I'd think you'd want easy navigation among the different "location" pages, so they can be visited in any order and still make sense. And, of course, no matter which location the page is about, it will have an unmissable opportunity to see and connect with the perfect solution for accommodations: Vacation Villa. IMVHO, rather than Small Town, Vacation Villa would really be your main page--navigationally speaking (but that's just my thought on it). Not many people will be doing a search for "Vacation at Vacation Villa", but whichever location they do search for will feed them into the Vacation Villa information.

So, each location page would need to make the reader eager to read more about Vacation Villa, but that doesn't mean all the pages would have to be the same. I'm sure you can come up with more variations on the theme than I can, but an example would be to have different photos of the villa on each page, so that someone who makes the rounds of all the pages will see something different on each one (but, yet, if someone visits just one page, they'll see something tempting).

I have absolutely no credentials or claim to be an expert in this kind of marketing, so someone who does may let me know I'm all wet (kindly, please?). But this is how I'd see the site working.

ETA: Just reread your post and saw the question about car hires, sports, etc. I don't know that I have any great ideas on that point, except to have links to pages with that information from the various location pages. Someone who knows more about KW/SE than I do could maybe say how it would be best to optimize those pages? It would seem overkill to me to have, say, separate car hire pages for Small Town, Big City, Big Area, and Country, but I honestly don't know.

[reddevil]

Beagle - thank you for your detailed reply and very valid points. Yes, I think you are right in that I could create different pages for each of the 6 different locations and yet make them somehow different. I will research the areas and try to change.

And, of course, no matter which location the page is about, it will have an unmissable opportunity to see and connect with the perfect solution for accommodations: Vacation Villa.

I love this comment and smiled to myself thinking about all the links that I could insert to my main villa page and making sure all my visitors at least have the opportunity to view my goods. Cheers for the tip.

For my Homepage menu I was thinking of putting the most juicy links that would attract people like - Beaches, Bars, Restaurants and other useful information like Car Hire, Flights etc. But then could I put 6 other links to the different areas like Small Town, Big Town, Big City, Big Area and Country? Do you think this would just look like a long list of names?

It would seem overkill to me to have, say, separate car hire pages for Small Town, Big City, Big Area, and Country

Yeh, me too, but I would like to capture people who are searching for car rental in Big Area and who have never heard about car rental in Small Town - any other comments on this aspect would be appreciated.