Ranking for top 20 cities, skip the small cities for now?

Skip the small cities first?

[pood]

I have a couple niche sites that I plan to rank for local terms ie: "pizza seattle"

My goal is to rank for the top 20 cities in the US for each niche (not pizza btw). My original plan was to upload the top 10 cities for each state now, maybe 10 a day, then build links for only the top 20 landing pages.

Today, I realized, since my primary goal is to rank for the top 20 cities, it would be better off for me to only upload the pages for the top 20 cities first, build links, once they are ranked where I want them to be ranked, I slowly upload the other pages

My reasoning being: more pages you have, less link juice each individual page will receive, so if you cut down on the pages on the site (maybe stick an no-index on the less pertinent pages), more juice will go toward your main keyword pages.

Although, I structured my site so that more internal links will go towards the top 20 pages, so maybe I should just upload the other cities now?

Thoughts?

[incrediblehelp]

Confused. What makes you think you will rank fro those targeted keywords but just creating pages for them?

[pood]

well, ill obviously build links for the the main site and deep. I think I will just upload all the pages since I have a pretty good internal link structure that will focus on the primary landing pages, shouldn't affect rankings.

[canadafred]

I would suspect (10 cities times 50 states equals 500 web pages) you'd have enough links internally to power up your link popularity for the important web pages (landing page etc.) but I highly doubt this plan of yours could sustain good rankings for the individual cities webpages in competitive keyphrase markets.

[caribguy]

I think you "misunderestimate" the amount of work involved to rank for even remotely competitive city+widget terms.

Not knowing much about your specific industry, I'd wager that you'd be better off developing in-depth content for a single region or city first, and apply the knowledge you'll have gained to replicate your success in additional markets later on.

Landing pages, link structures, and other optimization techniques won't get you a lot of leverage unless you first get a substantial number of eyeballs. Content = King