Small businesses and widget city searches

Do you repeat city on every page?

[Hanu]

When you're running a small website for a small business, you don't have a lot of money to promote your webpage, to buy pagerank, to hire staff to do link-campaigns and so on. This automatically puts you at the bottom of the SERPS unless your target phrase is "gloves for hamsters in africa".

The way most of these businesses (you) deal with this, is to narrow their target searches down to a local area or city by appending the name of the city/area to their main keyword. The problem with this approach is that you do not want to repeat the city/area name on every page. More technically speaking, the density of the word "widget" is naturally high since the business offers "widgets", whereas the city usually only appears in the title of every page and on the home page. For the remainder of the site, the name of the area is implicit, contextual information that should not be repeated unless you want to irritate your customers/visitors.

The same applies to inbound anchor text. The keyword naturally occurs in the anchor text, but the city is context, especially for links appearing in geographically organized directories.

What would you do in this case?

[mona]

I've had success adding the city/state in the footer on every page after the company name - it's a logical place to add it and the SEs pick it up.

[UDaMan]

Yeah, something like "Providing widgets in yourtown since 1902" works wonders in the footer of pages. Geographical loaction can also be built into your page by using alt attributes, image file-names, anchor text and a few more methods that I wouldn't want to disclose.

[Hanu]

I think I will do that. I actually have some photographs of my city's tourist attractions in the header. It wouldn't harm to put the city name there. The footer sounds like a good idea, too. I heard some rumors though that G strips template html (header, footer and so on) from each page before indexing it. OTOH, I have a hard time believing that. Being a programmer, I wouldn't know a reliable algorithm to do so.

Thanks a bunch!

[UDaMan]

I heard some rumors though that G strips template html (header, footer and so on) from each page before indexing it.

Not to seem pedantic but why would you design your HTML to visibly appear to include a header and a footer? I find web development so much easier if you can include your content in the following format and then present it from an external file to the template (without any comments etc)

<h1>Title</h1>
<p>paragraph 1</p>
<p>paragraph 2</p>
etc.......

This can be enclosed in a header and footer without any indication to the SE that you are using a template by utilizing server side includes of some sort.

[mona]

> I heard some rumors though that G strips template html (header, footer and so on) from each page before indexing it.

I can't give you the definitive answer to that question. But after I added the city to the footers on one of my sites, my ranking went from nowhere to top 50 - 10, depending on how competive the rest of the search phrase was. And the city (in the footer) was showing in the cache - if that means anything.