As you’ll see from my latest post, getting ranked these days has much more to do with links than it does the content on your page. It’s obviously very important to have your keywords on the page and in the appropriate places. But it’s all about the links if you’re trying to compete in a competitive niche.

Oh yea, don’t use invisible text. Google figured this one out real quick. Read my latest post entitled SEO Copywriting 3.0 for more info. More to come on the subject of writing content soon.

So what would you recommend to get listed for locale searches?

I’m pretty sure people will search for “widgets Glasgow” etc. We’ll only get found for this if we have pages with all relevant town names on it. Should we just blatantly put city names on these pages?

One of our rivals used to have a blackhat page which had a huge list of placenames on the page in invisible text. They were #1 for such searches but I think they may have been penalised by now. To be honest it will probably be searches for “widgets Scotland” so I intend optimising for those all pages with *various widgets* and *Scotland*

In addition to that, your mini-sites will have very little page rank or value so even if Google doesn’t notice that these sites are all made by you, the links back to the main site won’t help much.

You’re best bet is to build a great site, with great content (or products in your case) and spend your time getting valuable links back to your main site instead of trying to figure a way to do it easily.

There is no easy way. Google is smarter than all of us so spend your time optimizing one site and get high quality links (that are located within content ideally) back to your site.

And yes, Google does prefer sites that are “aged appropriately”. They’re feeling is that your site can’t be of much value if it just popped up on the radar. It takes time so don’t try to black hat your SEO. Learn to do it right from the start.

Chris

e.g. they search for it by locale, e.g. “widgets *city* “

each with genuine unique content but optimised towards “widgets *city*”

the 1st page when “widgets *city*”

I have a website selling widgets in the UK, but our domain name is companyname.co.uk

I suspect that when people search for the products we sell (for which there are plenty of competitors), they search for it by locale, e.g. “widgets “. To capture this, I was thinking about setting up a bunch of mini-sites, each with genuine unique content but optimised towards “widgets ” and linking back to the main site and each other, instantly creating 20 inter-referring sites. I’m hoping that either the mini-site or the main company site will be on the 1st page when “widgets ” are then searched for.

To achieve this I was going to register both “widgetscity.co.uk” and “widgets-city.co.uk” mainly to prevent anyone else copying my tactic.

Do you have any comments on this strategy? The one problem I can see is Google’s tendency to prefer websites that have been long established – suddenly having 20 websites spring up linking to you would be contrary to this so might not have as big an impact as they could.

Cheers for any comments.