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Hi Kalena…
I would like to optimize a website for its geographic location. In order to do so, I think I should preface certain home-page keyphrases with the name of the city. I’m wondering if I should repeat this practice throughout the website for better effectiveness, or would this be unnecessary? I’m also wondering please, what is the purpose of the Distribution Meta tag. Please let me know.
Thank-you
Peter
Dear Peter
First up, you should be aware (or perhaps you already are) of Google’s new feature that allows webmasters to associate a web site with a region/country.
Regarding how best to optimize a web site for different geographic locations or languages, sub-domains seem to be the way to go, as recommended by Matt Cutts of Google.
But if you are only optimizing for a single city, you should treat that city as another keyword on your page. That is, don’t repeat it ad-nauseum, only where it makes sense to do so. I would recommend no more than 5 repetitions of a target keyword or phrase on a single page. If your whole site content is about the city then it should naturally rank well for city-related phrases anyway as people will be linking to your site using the city name.
Regarding the Distribution META tag, as far as I am aware it is not a valid META tag, is unsupported by any search engine and the myth that you should include one has simply hung around like a bad smell like the Dublin Core META Tags. Skip it - otherwise it will simply contribute to your code bloat.
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Dear Kalena…
I would like to know your thoughts on tag clouds. We would like to add one to our careers web site but are being told that this is not an acceptable practice for business to business web sites and we will be black listed by search engines. Is it true that only blogs and internal social networking type sites are “allowed” to use these?
Kerry
Dear Kerry
Whoever gave you that advice is talking bollocks. For starters, if you use tags or topics on your site, tag clouds are a useful navigation feature to help your site visitors find the topics they are interested in. Tag clouds don’t have to be limited to blogs.
The idea that you will be black-listed by search engines for using tag clouds is utter nonsense! If it makes life easier for your readers to have a tag cloud on your site, go ahead and use one. If anything, a tag cloud will probably make it easier for all your various pages to be indexed by search engines as they are similar to a site map.
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Dear Kalena
I am currently using an SEO company and they are doing submissions for me every other month. They asked me if I wanted to do it every month, Will this be worth it to do it every month?
Thank you for your time
Darrell
Dear Darrell
I think your SEO company is ripping you off. Despite the hype, there is NEVER a need to resubmit to a search engine or directory unless your site is dropped entirely (which is a very rare occurrence). In fact, provided you have a link pointing to your site from a site already in the search engine’s index, you don’t need to submit your site to search engines in the first place. Search bots will find your site automatically as they sweep their database of indexed sites looking for new links to follow and new content to index.
Perhaps your SEO firm is talking about gaining new backward links for your site by submitting it to new niche directories and related sites each month? Ask to see the list of sites they are submitting your URL to each month. If the same engines are on the list month after month, they obviously have no clue about SEO and I’d ditch them quick smart.
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