Few questions regarding onsite content?

[activitysuper]

1. How important is having the keywords you are targeting on the page? Lets say you rank position 10 for 'Plumbing Services London' but you don't actually use the word 'London' at all in the page copy, what kind of effect could you expect if you added the word in the content?

Bit of a silly question really, I know it would have some effect but how important is it really?

2. What kind of effect would adding a blog with lets say 500 words of great content twice a week have on rankings? If you anchor text linked out of the copy would this alone help with ranking or is the reason for adding a blog to just use it as link bait to pull in more links, thus rankings are only effected when the blog starts to gain links?

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

If you are focused on generating local results, it is very important to have the geographic location in your keyword content.  In London, you should also look at the impact of neighborhood or "borough" or section of the city....listed with plumbing services.

The Blog provides two opportunities: The first is keyword content. Google looks to your site to establish keyword relevancy. The blog provides you an opportunity to do that on a consistent basis.

The second is related to linkbuilding.  Because relevant content has become so important, the blog can provide frsh content consistently to people that participate in discussions on the web...in the process you can earn links and listings from other blogs. In addition, good content can create some natural linking and viral sharing...this is the "linkbait" that you mention.

Regardless, all of your strategies are sound.

Here is a great article from SEOMOZ on a 6 month plan that is advanced but will give you solid detail on the subject:   http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-6-month-link-building-plan-for-an-established-website

Hope this helps.

Mark

[activitysuper]

Thanks for the nice reply.

Well if your homepage targeted your main location so lets say London, you then decided to target other areas say Manchester and Bristol using landing pages optimised against those terms so the content on these pages do have the location included in the content.

Now lets say visitors to those landing pages decided to venture outside of the page and visit the homepage, if you included London in the content it would look like, actually this company works in London and not Manchester.

I was thinking for every posts which would be around 500 words, I would add one anchor text link in the byline to the most relevant money page to the blog post.

Building social lists which contain active members I find can actually be quite difficult. Got any tips here?

[YNWA]

I would say it would be pretty important to include that word London on the page content. It will help regionalise your page with Google, more SEO'ers might be able to say if this is true.

But I would defo have your targeted jeyword phrase within the page info, why wouldn't you want to?

2. Are you talking about your own blog or using different peoples blogs?

If you mean your own blog, link value will get worse the more links you put on it, but I use my own blog to give my customers something interesting to read, something they will share with others and the links on page are used to navigate to my website, rather than gain some juice from them.

If you mean other peoples blogs, then all depends on the content and their domain value. Sure 2 blogs a week is great but you'd be better getting 1 blog a month on a high ranking, content relative blog than getting 2 blogs a week on low ranking, totally irrelevant content blog.

So my advice would be to do 3 things.

1. Put London in your page content.
2. Create your own blog
3. Use other, relevant, high ranking blogs to gain backlinks from, using unique content on every blog, with maybe no more than 1-2 links within a blog piece.

There is more to SEO than blog articles in my eyes. Social media is taking over the world, Twitter and Facebook provide huge audience potential for very little effort. Maximise that social gateway first is my view. What do others think?