SEO advice needed on displaying locations

[madeonmoon]

Hello All,

My lists freelance web development jobs (displaying rows with job title, location). The job search pages are indexed by Google (and others) and bring in decent results -- however, I was hoping that i could do better:

if someone is searching for "web developer chicago" or "web developer illinois", what display format for display field would result in a better SEO performance?

1) US-Illinois-Chicago
2) US - Illinois - Chicago
3) US - Illinois Chicago
4) something else?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Best,
James

[fathom]

I would say:

Web Developer Chicago Illinois

In fields and columns you can skip proper punctuation and although both trade position and location are important I would hedge the bet to trade "first".

[Dreamquick]

Out of curiousity;

If someone is looking for a specific trade/function in a specific place in the US wouldn't they simplify it to "Chicago, IL" or "Chicago IL" so it's formatted as it would appear in the postal address?

Not being in the US but having dealt a little with US formatted addresses I was just wondering if that would have any relevance / impact.

- Tony

[fathom]

although it does work in all instances the abbrev for illinois is the first two letters - thus google's partial matching would be able to cover both instances.

[Dreamquick]

Very true, but what about for states where the short form isn't contained in / composed of sequential letters of the long form name - would this be covered by stemming e.g. Arizona ~= AZ?

- Tony

[madeonmoon]

fathom,

can you rephrase? i am afraid i don't get your advice.

btw, specifying location on my site now consists of two fields: city and region/country. tha latter is a dropdown that contains: US-Illinois, Canada-Ontario, etc listed alphabetically. So when i build the composite location value a resulting value could be something like 'US-Illinois-Chicago'. is this not good from SEO perspective?

the reason i don't use "IL" or "CO" (for Colorado) is because this happens to be the first part of many many other words out there and i can't see someone who lives in a small town in Colorado searching for jobs using "web developer co" but i do see "web developer colorado". i could be wrong..

thanks for your advice!
James

[Robert Charlton]

My lists freelance web development jobs...

Your what?

A couple of months ago on another thread I posted my thoughts about city and state targeting... msg #5... which might be helpful here....

[webmasterworld.com...]

An excerpt...

The thing to remember about local searches is that there is no one pattern. Some searchers may include state name... some may use the abbreviation. Generally, though, if you don't have at least one instance of whatever it is on the page, you're not going to come up for the search, so for local targeting you have to target the page well for your core phrase, and then pick up all the peripheral targets with your location terms.

If the areas and terms are competitive enough, like big city hotels, you're going to have to build special pages (or even sites) for each location.

I'm not understanding what you mean by "fields" in the context of, I assume, a page on a website.

[madeonmoon]

So listing full state names (California) was a very bad decision of mine from an SEO standpoint. I switched back to using CA which works a lot better as there seem to be a whole lot more searches for 'web developer ca' than for 'web developer california'

[PhraSEOlogy]

Why dont you just hedge your bets and say:

Web developer CA (California)

[SlowMove]

I would use some duplication, maybe putting a listing on a metropolitan area page and a state page, and add some levels:

US
Illinois
Northern Illinois
Chicago, IL
Chicago North

[madeonmoon]

the page that i was talking about displays all job search results in a tabular form:

datePosted jobTitle location
1/2/04 web developer US-CA-Los Angeles
1/2/04 web designer US-MA-Boston

so i have to keep the location field as short as possible not to clutter the screen and yet serve well for SEO purposes...

Thanks all,
James