How can you rank for several cities ?
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I have a website design client who wishes to rank for several cities they are willing to service locally.
I have seen a competitor do this,
content all about web design
subcategories
main-site.com/web-design/city-name-website-designer
Content about web design plus content about the city itself and hiring a website designer in that city
main-site.com/web-design/next-city-name-website-designer
Content about web design plus content about the next city itself and hiring a website designer in that city
Is this a great strategy, it seems to be working for them, or will Google eventually penalize this ?
Or would you just put all 4 city names in the title and descriptions and content on one page ?
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Targeting the local search results (Places/Google+ Local) isn't always a viable strategy depending on the the competitiveness of the industry and the number of/geographic distance between the target cities. If you're in a really competitive industry and you're based in one city, and you're looking to target a city that's a 45 minute drive away, Google is likely going to serve up more geographically relevant search results, regardless of the quality of Local SEO work that you've done. In this case, you may be dealing with target keywords that don't always/often produce a local search results section.
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Pretty much everything that I've seen small/local businesses do in terms of on-page strategy in order to rank for a number of different localities is very spammy. It generally involves duplicate/thin content, and it sounds like that's what you're describing. However, I've seen these spammy/duplicate content strategies work well both in the past, and today.
I'd be interested to hear some other people's opinions on this, but it seems that for smaller sites panda & penguin haven't targeted them, and if you're an offender on a small scale, you can still get away with things that Google clearly doesn't want going on.
As for 4 city names in a title tag, that's not the most efficient use of a 70 characters.
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Things allways change in the SEO world.
here is a video for last Friday that discusses good internal linking (AKA site structuring to rank for more than one location) http://www.seomoz.org/blog/smarter-internal-linking-whiteboard-friday
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