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I deal with this same issue on my sites. I've read this advice a number of times: "optimize for the user first and the search engines second," and I think this is wise. My advice would be to try to get that exact match somewhere in your titles, URL, maybe in a heading here or there, but don't do it at the expense of making your copy sound weird.

Thanks. I've been trying to find a good tool for adding the canonical link to Joomla ... right now I'm using MetaGenerator but it doesn't let me specify exactly what URL should be the canonical and I guess it's just pulling the article and giving it the category alias. Any better idea on how to handle this in Joomla?

Need another set of eyes on my site from someone with Joomla experience. I'm running Joomla 2.5 (latest version) and SEOmoz is giving my duplicate content errors on a lot of my pages. I checked my sitemap, I checked my menus, and I checked my links, and I can't figure out how SEOmoz is finding the alternate paths to my content.

Home page is: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/

There's only one menu at the top.

Take the first link "Dania Beach" under fishing charters for example. This generates the SEF url: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/fishing-charters/broward-county/dania-beach-fishing-charters-and-fishing-boats.html

Somehow SEOmoz (and presumably all other robots) are finding duplicate content  at: http://www.vipfishingcharters.com/broward-county/dania-beach-fishing-charters-and-fishing-boats.html

SEOmoz says the referrer is the homepage/root.

The first URL is constructed using the menu aliases. The second one is constructed using the Joomla category and article alias.  Where is it getting this and how can I stop it?

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Wow thanks for all this feedback guys. Yes, I sensed that the best solution is write original content but it's true - there really are only a finite number of ways to explain what a sailfish is. I guess I can reword but how does Google's comparison engine work?

Assuming I could rewrite all the text, would it help to create separate file names for the images on each page (i am not going to have 40 different pictures of sailfish) - does this matter at all?

Searches for my site nearly always include a city name along with them so my original logic was to create a "landing page" for every city. Right now nearly 90% of my traffic is CPC but I'm trying to change that.

Would it make more sense to consolidate cities and group them on a smaller number of pages or does this then kill the localized search?

New to SEO and SEOmoz. I tried searching for this first and I'm sure it's on here but I could not find it.

I have a site that markets fishing charters in a few dozen cities. Up to now I was relying on PPC and using each city page as a landing page of sorts. Each citiy page is very similar (there are only so many ways to write about a type of fish or fishing). What would be the recommended way for optimizing this, keeping in mind the duplicate information we provide on each page seems to be important to people.

Site is www.vipfishingcharters.com

Thanks!

I deal with this same issue on my sites. I've read this advice a number of times: "optimize for the user first and the search engines second," and I think this is wise. My advice would be to try to get that exact match somewhere in your titles, URL, maybe in a heading here or there, but don't do it at the expense of making your copy sound weird.