Welcome to the Q&A Forum

Hello,

Assuming that we leave blogging out of the equation for now...

(Since you should be using a blog to provide value to readers, and will probably going for longer-tail phrases rather than things like "keyword-or-service in City")

My strong preference is building sections off the root domain rather than microsites on subdomains. You'll get more benefit from the other tactics you mentioned with this setup than you will from subdomains. You'll also have a far easier time of it trying to rank one site with multiple pages, rather than a new site for each location.

Realistically, the subdomain and new site tactics are going to be either 1) A massive amount of work to write great content or 2) Full of weak content. Using the root domain, on the other hand, allows you to rank for your keyword and location while still offering visitors great content that is more generalized (assuming that your different locations provide the same services).

Link-building wise, I'd definitely focus on building links to the location pages. I would be wary of getting too specific with your anchor text, however -- I wonder how much value there is in a link where you could get anchor text that includes both the keyword and location, and too much of it is going to look artificial very quickly. In this situation, I rely more on on-page targeting and strong local search listings for each location than I do anchor text.

I'm sure others will have more to contribute, but I hope this helps.

I had a similar experience with a client recently, where the map interface was different from the Google+ local listing. I had to clean up the data sources, and report a problem with the listing.

How is the listing being managed? Through the new Google+ local interface, or the old Google Places interface?

Because Yelp and Mapquest were incorrect, it makes me wonder if there's incorrect information at either Localeze, Infogroup (not infousa) or Axciom - if you look at the Ecosystem map, Yelp appears to pull from Axciom while Mapquest pulls from Localeze and Infogroup.

I'd strongly recommend checking those three upstream data providers out. They can and will override your Google information. I believe you can get to Axciom with http://mybusinesslistingmanager.com, infogroup with http://expressupdateusa.com, and localeze at http://business-listing.localeze.com/sign-up-with-localeze.aspx

They're different products, and I don't think they serve the same role, so they're hard to compare.

Yext is more about listing management and control. Localeze and UBL are more about hitting upstream data providers and getting full coverage. They're best used in some sort of combination, so I don't think this is an either/or choice.

I can talk from recent experience about UBL and Yext. Less so about Localeze because I've never used the enhanced listings product. Maybe someone else can chime in on that one.

The results we have seen with UBL have been mixed. Initially we were happy with the service. Although we found that it tended to create some duplicates if we weren't incredibly careful, the distribution was good. Recently (the past 6 months) we've seen more duplicates happen due to UBL, and in some cases data doesn't appear to have been distributed at all. This is only my own experience, though, so perhaps I ran into issues that don't normally happen.

Yext was nice to use, and I think it's valuable in that it's offering rapid access and changes via what they describe as a custom API.  It's much easier to update data quickly, and it seems to have a pretty solid selection. On the flip side, it's expensive for small businesses, and, again, doesn't hit the upstream data providers.

(also, recent review on Yext by Mike Blumenthal here: http://blumenthals.com/blog/2012/03/01/yext-local-seo/)

I've only ever used Localeze to ensure the upstream data is accurate and to avoid duplicates. At the very least, I think you have to involve the regular version in order to get the data consistent.

So, personally, I'd deal with the upstream data from Localeze and infogroup etc. manually, wait for it all to settle out, and then consider Yext as a way to manage some of the major portals.

Hope this helps.

Do not consider the application of rotating software. Additionally SEOmoz congregation doesn't facilitate application of these leverages.

Recompose the articulation and that will facilitate goodness you more.

(or, +1 William)

I would go with one site that has location pages for the following reasons:

• You'll probably be starting with fresh domains for your micro sites. If you use the existing site, you'll have some DA built up, which will assist your subpages. You're basically going to be counting on the fact that the location including URL is going to be a big part of getting ranked, and I'm not sure how that would play out long-term, especially given the recent(ish) EMD changes.
• I'd imagine the micro sites won't be providing any value for your customer that you couldn't provide with the main site. Why make them change sites to learn about the company? When I'm searching for products or services and see this, I get just a little bit more suspicious about the company, which makes the sale harder.
• Even with your unique content, your microsites are probably going to be fairly light on content (e.g. just a few pages) if they're all linking back to the same place, it might seem like you're gaming the system for backlinks.
• You probably don't have an easy way of handling your NAP data on all of these different sites. Duplicate local listings suck if they get generated accidentally.
• And, probably the biggest one for me - if you stick with one site, and get your internal structure right, link building efforts for any of the location pages (or the main page) are going to benefit the other subpages as well, so you get more bang for your buck. That's more sustainable in the long run.

Hi Arthur,

It sounds as though "Option A" is being generated by an already-existing Yellow Pages listing with incorrect information?

If so, I think you should deal with the Yellow Pages issues first. You should also track down all the other data sources that might be providing incorrect information to Google. I highly recommend David Mihm's "Local Search Ecosystem" which you can find here: http://www.davidmihm.com/blog/seo-industry/local-search-ecosystem-2012/

Here's the thing, though. They're not true duplicate listings if they have different addresses. You may have some issues getting them merged until you can update the data. So, once you've dealt with the upstream data providers, I'd go ahead and modify the incorrect listing without claiming it, making it match the correct listing perfectly. Once you've done that, you should have more luck with the merging process.

My opinion is that claiming both listings is **not **the way to go. Having two listings for the same location in your account is in violation of the Google guidelines, and I see no advantage to it. Instead, you should follow this process order to merge duplicate listings: http://support.google.com/places/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=183009

As for which listing to chose as the primary - that's a tough one. Did you say that Option B is already ranked #1? If so, I'd probably go with that one, but only once everything else has been fixed.

In summary:

1. Correct the upstream data providers that are causing the problem. Try to track them all down
2. Modify the incorrect listing so it is identical to the correct one
3. Claim one of them - I'm thinking the one that's ranked #1, but someone else may disagree
4. DON'T claim the second one. Instead, follow the Google guidelines to report a duplicate listing.

I agree with imageworks...

Your service area settings on your places page should reflect how the business actually interacts with customers. Prior to something like 18 months ago, hiding your location seemed to negatively impact listings. These days, my experience is that there is little, if any, penalty to doing this.

That said, even if there is a slight penalty to hiding the location, I'd do it anyway. As recently as February and March of 2012, Google seemed to be enforcing this particular guideline by actually calling some businesses and asking. A minor penalty is better than having your listing vanish along with all traffic.

Miriam Ellis wrote a post about this in March: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/why-you-may-need-to-hide-your-google-places-address-asap

Hope this helps!

I agree that the answer lies in how many people take it up.

I think that one of the biggest deciding factors is going to be how easy the most popular CMS's make integrating this. If WordPress can get this done natively, for instance, a way to write a post and, via dropdown, select what type of data each line/paragraph is? I think that'd be huge, and it would explode.

Personally, I've always been interested in getting Google's rich snippets to appear. I think it can have a huge influence on clickthroughs. And, I think that schema.org indicates that such content will become more and more commonplace. I've managed to get it to happen for one site, which had the majority of its content focused on recipes. We definitely saw an uptick in traffic without a ranking change.

I'll be continuing to keep my eye on it, at first glance it seems like a huge task. In the end, I think it will definitely be something that we add into our work. The big search engine's partnering on this is too hard to ignore.

As you did, I'd normally handle this with a 301 from index.html to the root domain. When you say that it's "not had an impact" do you mean that the SEOmoz dashboard continues to show an error after it re-crawls, or that the search engines are not picking up the redirect?

SEOmoz dashboard does a great job, but I'd check to see how the search engines are actually indexing yourdomain.com/index.html vs. yourdomain.com also. If the search engines are indexing it as you want them to, then I'd be inclined to ignore the dashboard error.

I apologize if this is a stupid question, but I assume you manually checked that the redirect worked?

Hi Zach,

Sounds like you're quite close to us. We're over in Lancaster, PA.

I've been wrestling with the places vs +local issue too, and don't have a solution. I did just have an interesting experience, though. We recently had a client who created a Google +Local page (without telling us). That +Local page is now outranking the original Places page for brand-name searches. I can't tell you which one ranks better for non brand-name searches, because I'm still cleaning up data upstream, and they're not really ranking at all at this point because of that.

I'm not sure if this is indicative of anything at all, and I'm hoping someone else can weigh in on the subject, because I'm still trying to decide what to do. That said, I thought it might be something to consider.

For the Google +Business and Google +Local page merge question, there is a merge process that should give you (some) of the functionality of both a +Local and a Business page. But...  the whole system has been described as, among other things, a train wreck whose implications are unclear.

In my personal experiments, I've had a couple of instances where the merge process has not worked at all. So, at Kiwi, we're taking a "Let's wait and see" approach with the system. I'd rather see two separate pages than the kind of mishmash disaster Google is capable of creating with local business information.

Edit: Oh, one other thing to consider on the +Local vs. Places question. Updates to Places are taking an extremely long time to push to the listing, and some information is not arriving at all.

Hi George,

I recently had a bad experience with a related posts plugin - I had a client site go down for a few hours, and had to deactivate it because it was causing too much CPU load. Apparently most related posts plugins run multiple queries multiple times, which is hard on the server.

(Maybe someone with more server/MySQL experience can provide a good explanation as to why this is).

I ended up going with the "Efficient Related Posts" plugin as a replacement. It seems to be working fine so far, and we've had no more issues with CPU usage. It sounds like it will do what you want as well:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/efficient-related-posts/

This is only based on my experience, though, so please take the recommendation with a grain of salt - test first!

Over the past two weeks I've noticed that Google has decided to change which pages on our site rank for specific keywords. The thing is, this is for keywords that the homepage was already ranking for. Due to our workload, we've made no changes to the site, and I'm not tracking any additional backlinks. Certainly there are no new deep links to these pages.

In SEOmoz dashboard (and via tools/manual checking with a proxy) of the 24 terms we have first page ranking for, 9 of them are marked "new to top 50". These are terms we were already ranking for. Google just appears to have switched out the homepage for other pages.

I've noticed this across a couple of client sites, too, though none to the extent that I'm seeing on our own.

Certainly this isn't a bad thing, as the deeper pages ranking means that they're landing on the content they want first, and I can work to up the conversion rates. It's just caught me by surprise.

Anyone else noticing similar changes?

Ugh, leaving the privacy settings on for WordPress is always frustrating.

I don't think you have to redo anything. The site will eventually be re-crawled (which you might be able to speed up with some smart link building), and I don't think you'll have lost anything when that happens. If there were links in place, they're still in place, and the SEO work you've done on-page will still retain its value.

It might just take a bit of time for the whole site to get re-indexed again (of course, if it was never indexed then you have nothing to worry about). I wouldn't worry about the robots.txt crawl rate, it gets ignored anyway.

Hi Carin,

Here's how I would handle it, assuming the client controls the listing that is "showing up in Google Local"

1. See if the client can provide you the login information for the directory, and then update it manually.

2. Search using the incorrect business name, to see if the incorrect listing has propagated to any other directories. Fix those, too.

3. Search using the business phone number and/or address and look for incorrect business names, just to catch any stragglers.

4. Check with InfoUSA, infogroup, Superpages, and Localeze, just to be sure everything is correct there.Check out the ever useful David Mihm's Local Search Ecosystem here to see if there's anything else you should look into.

5. Assuming the client controls the Google local listing, fix it there. If it's just one listing and the client doesn't control it, claim and verify it (don't submit a new one!). If it's a duplicate, see my note below.

6. (optional) Place bets on how long Google will take to actually update the information.

NB If there are duplicate listings, (e.g. the one that is "showing up in Google Local" is a second listing) do all of the above except for 5) and then report the old one as a duplicate in Google, providing the URL of the correct listing.

Steve, why would they hand submit a G+ local listing if there's already a listing in place? It seems like that would risk creating duplicates.

I'm curious what tactics people are finding successful in converting readers into leads, inquiries, or sales.

Anyone feel like sharing?

To me, that's not what your 404 page is for. I wouldn't recommend doing it. What happens if they typo something, or hit a bad link some other way? There's no message to tell them what happened and it creates a confusing user experience.

Better, in my opinion, to redirect the file individually

Arti, there's a good article on SEOmoz about redirects. Down the bottom, there are some how-to guides on how to do things like 301's. Just be careful of infinite loops if you're using apache.

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/url-rewrites-and-301-redirects-how-does-it-all-work

Given how broken Google Alerts has been, I probably wouldn't rely on that. Venture Beat did an article on alternatives and there's a nice comparison of three alternatives on YouMoz.

Personally, I use an AdWords account that isn't linked to a credit card when I use the keyword tool to check things out.

This is a bit of a grey area for Google right now.

First of all, I would clean up your upstream data to reflect the new location. If you don't do this, you risk the listing coming back. Let me know if you want more specifics on that.

Current best practice with Google when moving locations (I know you're not moving, but you're essentially dealing with the same issue) is to mark the old location closed and open a new one. At this point, you've already "opened a new one" so my opinion is that you should be marking the old listing closed and waiting for it to go away.

Pinterest links all appear to be marked "no follow", so unless there are followed links buried deeper in the site that I'm missing, the SEO is correct.

As David said, Pinterest isn't a link building tool, it's about traffic and eyeballs - even if they were followed, I'd question the value of it beyond getting one or two links - but, in any case, they're not.

Definitely eliminate personalization, as alsvik said. Beyond that, though, there are still other factors (Location, I.P address etc.) that you need to account for.

The best way I've found to handle it is to forget the idea of a "true reading". There are too many variables to eliminate in the real world. Instead, keep your measuring consistent and prove value that way. If you measure in the same way each time you can demonstrate an increase or decline in rankings, because the variables will always be the same

The various tracking tools, while not perfect, will eliminate some of the variables, and will certainly give you a consistent read each time.

From a client management perspective, it's more about setting client expectations than anything else. You need to discuss the fact that results may be slightly different when they check. You also need to explain why.

Once you've done that, you need to get your client to agree to the process you'll be using to track rank. If you use SEOmoz rank tracker, or Raventools, or whatever else, then get their buy-in that that platform is the one you'll be using to measure the effectiveness of your work . If you don't, you're likely to end up playing the "I'm not ranking where you say I am" game.

Edit: If you're tracking rank manually, then consider looking for something like the Bruce Clay toolbar, which will let you run searches via proxy.

Hi andymisiu,

Unless I'm misunderstanding, you're looking at the editor in Visual and HTML view, and only seeing [table id=2 /] instead of the HTML table it generates?

If I'm correct, that's perfectly OK. What you're seeing in the editor isn't exactly what's being displayed to someone who visits your site (or to the search engines).

The [table id=2 /] is a WordPress shortcode that basically says to WordPress "when you generate this page, call display the table 2". Even when you switch to HTML view in the WordPress editor, it's still only going to show you the shortcode, as it's not going to display the final HTML until someone visits the URL.

What matters is what's showing up in the page source when someone visits the URL (e.g. after WordPress has processed the short code). You can can check that by going to the URL (published or via preview) and viewing the page source. I've used WP Tables Reloaded before and my experience is that the HTML it produces is fine.

Hope this helps!

According to the FAQ's, No.

http://www.seomoz.org/dp/webapp-faq

No. There's no difference between a mobile number and a landline number. So long as the mobile number has a local area code.

As Anita said, just remember to be consistent.

I'd check out whether Google still has the linking pages cached before making a decision (at least some of them). If Google has recrawled them since they went "dead" you may not have a decision to worry about

Are the sites completely irrelevant and spammy, or decent but completely off topic?

Hi Sean,

I'd be wary of inferring too much from one week's worth of results. Depending on the site, a 3% variation could just be weekly fluctuations.

A few things might help shed some light on the situation:

When did you make the changes? It's possible that you can rule out your changes as the cause of the differences by figuring out if the search engines have indexed them yet.

I'd take a look at Google Analytics in depth and see if there's any kind of weekly/month variance across at least a year of data. Maybe the first week of the month gets more traffic historically - unfortunately I've found SEOmoz doesn't provide data back far enough to catch this kind of thing.

I'd also use GA to compare month-to-month traffic and see if there are any keywords or phrases that are receiving less traffic for each portion of the month.

Have you seen any ranking changes? There's a slight difference in URLs receiving entrances compared to last week. These might account for a drop off if a page has stopped ranking for a specific phrase. I'd be surprised if you lost traffic by removing those duplicates you mentioned, as it's less common for duplicate pages to rank twice for the same result, or for them to rank differently for different results.

Again, it could easily just be normal variation, but the above things are where I would start.

Unfortunately I do not have experience in the UK. I have done a smattering of work in New Zealand (for friends, since that's where I'm from originally)  where the mobile number system doesn't have area codes (027 and 021 are the only two prefixes for mobile). For more competitive phrases, I've never seen a business using a mobile number rank. This is only for a very small amount of work, however, and it could well be that there are other factors in play (such as the fact that the people using mobile numbers don't have any optimization, either).

I have a hard time believing that the UK algo would be so massively different from the US one that it would ignore phone number area codes.

Because it's a fairly big factor in the US, if I were being asked to make the call, I'd go with a landline with a local area code, which forwards to your mobile.

Seems like it might be a pretty grey area for SEOmoz to get into.

As the owner of an agency, I can see why some agencies might get upset at having anything at all transferred over -- if that agency has paid for the account and the employee's time when they're building community/brand.

We've avoided this by having participation in the community come from me, and having the account with client information handled the same way. Staff or freelancers that want to participate do so on their own accounts, so there's no confusion there. Pretty much a similar situation to what Charles suggested.

On the off chance that you're with a company that's thought about this - you might also want to check your contract for ownership of profiles created on company time. We don't do it, but I know of other companies, even locally here in Amish country Lancaster, PA, who do.

The Google FAQs about places and rich snippets (which you're going to generate by adding schema.org markup) says that they will not negatively or positively impact rankings. But...

I'm going to suggest that it almost certainly seems like they will, -if- you can get Google to pick them up from your site and add them to your places listing.

Obviously, the number of reviews that Google can pull from other local-portal sites is a ranking factor. In May, Mike Blumenthal wrote a blog post which identified places listings where he had seen Google including hreview testimonials pulled directly from the business's own website.

I'm skeptical that Google is going to treat these reviews differently from reviews from other sources, and somehow exclude them from their ranking algo for places. If Google didn't believe that the reviews are valid, then they wouldn't include them in the first place, because it would make for a really poor user experience. If they're not excluding them for user experience reasons, I doubt they'll exclude them from being a ranking factor.  Which means, to me, that (if you can get the picked up) they'll have a positive impact on rank.

From a purely technical perspective, there's no reason that I can think of.  I can, however, think of some business, relationship, and link building reasons.

• Greater understanding of the geographic area and nuances. Working in Lancaster, PA, for instance, I've seen some seriously weird phrases that people use (and search for) idiomatically.

• Potentially stronger (or already existing) local relationships for link building, both in terms of local business relationships as well as with local niche sites and authorities (e.g. newspapers).

• Face-to-Face might, potentially, offer more accountability. I guess this one depends very strongly on the company you're dealing with, but you could make the argument that an SEO would develop a better understanding of your business if they meet you.

I can also think of some downsides, like lack of talent in your area.

Whether you're looking locally or further abroad, if you have concerns, references or referrals are always a big help, in my opinion.

Hi Mike,

In your case, I'm definitely not disagreeing with what you're saying - I'm more just considering how it could be a little rough for SEOmoz to handle this. And, if you were building in the Agency's name (which I understand you're not) how they might look at it.

It would be nice if you could just get your agency to export any client campaign history and then switch the billing over to you. In this situation, it would be the classy thing for them to do.

I've always gone with Xenu, though I've heard good things about the already-mentioned Screaming Frog.

Dr. Pete did a nice comparison last year of the two:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/crawler-faceoff-xenu-vs-screaming-frog

Just throwing this out there, but, could rel=canonical be augmented or assisted in this case by URL parameters in webmaster tools?

https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1235687

Someone might disagree with me, but I don't think it will be an issue. To some extent, it seems to me that what you're describing happens pretty regularly anyway.

Take, say, the Thesis theme for WordPress. Hundreds or even thousands of people use it. I'm sure there are businesses out there that use the same basic navigation (Home, About Us, Services, Contact) and who don't customize it very much. That means that the only significant difference is the content. I haven't ever heard of this being a problem.

A similar (though not identical) situation occurs sites my company develops for our clients  We start the coding on many of them with the TwentyTen/Eleven themes, as they provide a solid base. While the sites look totally different, the core pieces of the code, the majority of the classes and ID's, the HTML structure, are the same. The only real difference is the CSS. Again, because they're small/medium businesses, they often have very similar navigation structure. So far we haven't had any trouble ranking them.

Anecdotal evidence that doesn't fit your situation perfectly, I know, but my gut feeling is that you'll be fine so long as the content is unique.

From a user experience, you might want to consider at least convincing him to change any photos out. Nothing says cloned site like identical images.

Hi Pantelis,

I think that whether or not this is a problem, and how it should be fixed, depends on how your blog is set up.

The guide Justin mentioned is a good resource. Before you jump in, I think you should consider these questions:

When you go to domain.com/blog/seo etc. are the posts excerpted, or are full posts being displayed?

When someone clicks on the title of a blog post having found it under a tag (e.g. going to domain.com/blog/marketing and clicking on one of the posts) what URL is being displayed for the individual post?

e.g. is it domain.com/blog/seo/great-post-1 or is it domain.com/blog/great-post-1 ?

What really matters for duplicate content and canonicalization is whether the URL for the individual blog post is unique.

If the blog post has one unique URL, no matter how you get to it, and if the tags pages are displaying excerpts, then the only place you should be using rel=canonical is on the blog post itself. I think putting rel=canonical on a tags page that's only displaying titles and excerpts is asking for trouble. I don't like the idea of the search engines potentially thinking that your tag page, which has partials of many posts, is the original source.

If you're displaying full blog posts on the tags pages, then the solution is probably to switch it to excerpts and canonicalize only the individual blog posts.

Reference the SEOmoz blog: The SEOmoz.org/blog page doesn't use rel=canonical, and only displays excerpts, while seomoz.org/blog/post-title uses rel=canonical and displays the full post.

I agree with Jeremy. If they don't want to list their home address, and don't have an address they can serve people at, like an office, then hide it. Google seems to be calling more often recently to see if businesses can serve people at the location listed.

Luckily, there no longer seems to be a ranking penalty for hiding your address. http://blumenthals.com/blog/2010/11/03/google-places-search-hiding-address-no-longer-buries-listing/

I think you should be good leaving it alone, then.

You could put rel=canonical on the post page only (don't put it on the tags or category pages) but that might be more trouble than it's worth, depending on the restrictions imposed by the CMS.

Hello,

Your question about iframes has already been answered, but I thought I'd share my experiences with Sharepoint as a blog platform...

I've just spent the past few months building a site in Sharepoint with a blog. We ended up coming up with a couple of different solutions from an SEO perspective...

The biggest issues the out-of-the-box blog in Sharepoint (I'm assumine 2010 or 2007 here) faces are:

• Lack of SEO friendly URLs
• No meta description
• The apparent inability to display an excerpt on the homepage of the blog.
• Horrible horrible commenting system

Unfortunately the blog uses a query to pull the posts from a list, and it's a lot harder to modify than a standard page layout.

We've been testing out two solutions:

1. Using an article page for the blog post, a content query web part to roll up these articles on a "blog" page, and then used the Byline field on the article as a way to power both the meta description (I can locate the code for you for that if you want) and the excerpt.

We then created "category" pages which contained another content query web part, which attempted to display all posts that had a certain keyword in them.

Finally, we ditched the Sharepoint comments system altogether, and used Disqus (which was surprisingly easy to add to the blog)

It was pretty clunky, but from a purely SEO perspective, it's working out fine.

2. That said, we're unhappy with how clunky it is for internal users, so we're now working with an open source solution that enhances Sharepoint's native blog. http://cks.codeplex.com/releases/view/28520

Just this morning we got it to work with Sharepoint 2010. It covers most of the issues I outlined above (though we're still going to implement disqus) aside from the meta description, which is what I'm set to tackle next.

Hopefully this provides some guidance on where you might be able to go while remaining with Sharepoint.

Hi Cesar,

It might be too late, but you should check to see if Google has even crawled that page yet (check out the cache, and whether or not your changes are showing up in the SERPS).

Can you be specific about what you mean by "Meta titles"? Do you mean title tags?

Title tags will certainly have an effect on your ranking. Meta descriptions and keywords will not (though the former will certainly affect click-through rates).

If you are talking about title tags, can you tell us what you changed them to? and what they were before?

Are there any other issues or changes that might affect rankings? For which phrases did the rank drop happen?

+1 for Yoast and the comments about it being more important than the theme. I've yet to encounter compatibility issues with the plugin, and we do a lot of development work in WordPress.

Personally, I think a decent paragraph of text is good to have on the homepage. That said, if you've got sub-pages that are more appropriate to your keywords, ranking them is most likely going to yield the best long-term results, even if it takes a bit longer.