Menu Links
-
I am building a website with the category "water damage repair" and in the menu of the website I want a drop-down menu that contains the keyword + geolocation for example "water damage detroit" "water damage chicago" "water damage New York" and they will all be drop downs so that I can have the exact match keywords in the menu and on the page but I want them all to link to the same page so that I don't have to build out 5 different pages that all have the same general information on them, I would rather just have the categories with the keyword rich words then them all point to the same area.
Is this a good idea to have a drop down menu for a category "Water Damage Repair" and then have 5 different Exact match keywords like "water damage detroit" and then have all of those exact match keywords link to the same page or should they all have individual content for each exact patch keyword even though they are all the same topic?
-
It cut off my answer so I'll add it here:
This is what I would say. Don't create these pages. I assume you have locations in each city, instead develop resources for each city including location details, and other information specific to them. If you don't have resources for them per city, you shouldn't be going per city. Do things for the users, not for ranking. But above all else, don't create these pages. Have a water damage page if you must and if the information changes per city, or you have locations, then create those resource pages. But if those locations do more than water damage repair, don't build one for each. Just give information about that location, what they offer and any other information people might want in that area. Hope this helps.
-
Thanks for the input, the main question I have is if I have a menu that says "Water Damage Repair" is it good to have a drop down menu to say "Water Damage Repair Detroit"
or should the drop down just be "detroit"
-
_Hold the fort for a while. I am not concerned about the menu or the way you are going to feature the links. What concerns me is that you are going to make your website very much vulnerable to Panda updates. By creating pages that are solely built for ranking high in some Location specific pages, you can make your website very much susceptible to algo updates. Build a website for users and not for search engines. This is what I would like to suggest you. However, if you still want to create location specific pages to rank high in location specific keywords, you need to make sure that you are not adding run of the mill content. Focus on what kind of exciting things you are going to offer to people of that location. _
-
First things first: Matthew Stafford, you are my starting fantasy football quarterback and in two weeks we are in the playoffs. Please be awesome
To address your question: I personally try to avoid optimizing any one page for too many keywords. It's one of those situations where if you decide to optimize one page for everything you end up really, truly optimizing that one page for nothing.
If you have five different locations that you want to optimize for, I'd create a page for each of them and vary the content enough so that you don't have duplicate content from page to page to page.
Good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Internal Linking: What is the best practice for pages not included in Nav bar?
I never quite understood why internal linking was such a big deal for SEO, but now I'm having second thoughts and perhaps understanding it more. I always thought since most websites have a navigation feature--usually the menu bar located at the top and often another one in the footer--that internal navigation was usually already built in to most websites and therefore, a silly topic to make a fuss over; however, I may be the silly one after all. I am now creating pages that are not included in the navigation so.... What is the best practice for this? If I am creating say, pages for certain locations and those location pages begin to number in the hundreds, it makes my navigation bar a little too cumbersome to have all those pages in a drop down menu. So I made a Locations page and just link to all those pages from that page (and from nowhere else). But now I'm wondering if this could be a bad internal linking practice and perhaps hurt my online visibility as an SEO ranking factor. Is this a crawl problem? And if so, is there a better option that provides a good visitor experience while appeasing the search engines.
Web Design | | Dino640 -
Is the 'too many links' caused by the tags?
Hello Just got my seomoz report and decided I better start takiling things. Got a lot of 'too many links' on the report. I don't have control over website design and before I talk to designer I thought I should have a bit of an handle on what I am talking about. I've taken one page that has 483 links. Is this caused by the tags box and would it be a good idea to have it removed? http://commonwealthcontractors.com/uk-visas/tier-2-general-visas-formerly-uk-work-permits/ Regards Niamh
Web Design | | Niamh20 -
How to link to a site without passing ANY linkjuice (other than simply nofollowing)
I have heard that there are other ways of linking to a site, to completely avoid passing any seo value I think it was even in a whiteboard friday video where I saw Rand say something about doing a 307 "temporary" redirect, or something like that? Basically, I want to let my customers compare our prices with ebay, but I don't want to have ebay outrank us (for obvious reasons) Any help?
Web Design | | TylerAbernethy0 -
Linking root and domain authority
Hi SEOMOZ community, Can you please advise on how to increase Linking root domains and domain authority. much appreciated.
Web Design | | wahin10 -
Linking to an image with the keyword in the title and alt tags.
Hi guys, Just thought I'd ask for opinions about an ecommerce catalog I'm working on. I don't know if it's even worth worrying about, but here's the scenario. Let's say I'm linking to a category called 'Sale' using an image, I have the title tag of the link as 'Sale', the image title is also 'Sale' as well as the alt tag. The HTML looks like this: Sale The page itself is: http://www.fashionbasicsonline.com/catDisplay So my question is, do you think I'm stuffing the keyword in too many times there? It's CMS driven so I could have the alt tag as 'Sale Products' or one of the titles as 'Sale Catalog' perhaps, do you think there would be a benefit in doing that? Maybe it's microoptimisation and I should be looking at other low hanging fruit, but I'm just trying to come up with the best scenario. Would love to hear what you think. Cheers, Bruce p.s. Looking forward to meeting as many people as possible at MozCon next week 🙂
Web Design | | bruce_werdschinski0 -
Sub-pages with more links than homepage - bad?
Hi,
Web Design | | rayvensoft
I am working on merging a number of my niche websites into a larger site (301 redirects, phased in over a few months). My question/concern is whether google will penalize the main site when it sees that the homepage has almost no links to it, and that about 10-15 sub-pages have a lot of links back to it. Does anybody have experience with this kind of scenario? Will it create a problem? Theoretically I could spend a year or so building up links to the new main page - building the brand - before doing the 301's. The smaller pages still bring in clients, but it is getting hard to maintain that many micro sites. Thanks in advance for any help.0 -
Are links from main page to inner pages will affect on ranking?
About 3 weeks ago I converted index.html to index.php. Both are 301 redirect to main url. Also I have about 70 links on main page pointing to internal pages. The Website is about 11 years old,and was on active link building . Is this conversion from html to php and also 70 links pointing to inner pages will affect on ranking?Since all links are passing juice to inner pages.
Web Design | | LosAngelesLimo0 -
Best way to handle related content links in a sidebar?
My site contains tens of thousands of articles, studies, multimedia files, biographies, etc. To assist users with finding content that might be related to the page they're on, I use a side bar with 'also of interest' links to other, similar content on my site. This is, of course, pretty standard practice. Search engines -- Google in particular -- index these pages and then include the text in the sidebar links in search results. So, for example, on a given page I may have 20 links to related content, and the text in those links might be, 'A story about subject ABC.' When I search for 'A story about subject ABC,' Google returns not only the page titled (and containing the content) 'A story about subject ABC.' but also every page that links to it and happens to have that link text in the sidebar. What is the proper way to handle this kind of thing?
Web Design | | smorrison0