England Folk and Counties

[maccas]

I posted something similar a while back but can't seem to find it. Anyway what would your average person from England say the county is for say Newcastle upon Tyne? Would you say Tyne and Wear or Northumberland? What about East and West Sussex? Would you just use Sussex in your keywords if searching for a town etc? I am not sure whether I should use the old counties or the new ones?

[Leosghost]

Depends on the age of your target demographic ..
I remember the "ridings" ..50+ ;-)

[topr8]

i'm not sure what your getting at by i don't think people in the uk think of cities as being in a county,

people say: birmingham, london, newcastle and so on (i don't know anyone who would even refer to it as newcastle upon tyne for instance)
there is no common usage of the county too.

maybe i'm missing the point of the question

[kaled]

The only time people worry about counties, etc. is if they are interested in local government, police, education... or if there are two towns with the same name such as Henley on Thames and Henley in Arden.

If you need to use further information beyond the town/city name, you should probably use the county name in most cases rather than local authority name, e.g. you would talk about Telford in Shropshire rather than the Telford and Wrekin area.

Kaled.

[piskie]

In a long and rural County such as Cornwall, I find "Cornwall" to be the most used geographic qualifier in 80%+ of searches in the market sectors that I work in. There is no major population centre otherwise Cities or large Towns would appear in the referers.

Clearly the major rural conurbations: London, Manchester Birmingham, Leeds, Bradford, Leicester etc are going to be used in searches if appropriate. Rural spreads are on the other hand going to generate County or even regional geographic qualifiers.

So it is horses for courses and down to SEO judgement. That's what we're paid for.

[mack]

It's difficult to get an acurate list. or database for UK counties. Royalmail sell a CVS file with the currect up to date official listings.

If you search online you will find many different versions of the list, there was a major shake up in the late eighties and many towns changed county etc.

Mack.