SEO strategy recommendations?

[idv]

Hi

My website http://www.harrisbassett.co.uk is now ranking on the 1st page of Bing and Google for phrases such as Chartered Accountant Swansea and Tax Planners Swansea

But the phrase 'accountants swansea' is still performing poorly - as it is near the bottom of the second page?

Would I be better placing more accountant swansea phrases on the homepage of the site or would this have an adverse effect on the current 'Chartered Accountants Swansea' ranking as would this be classed as keyword cannabilisation?

So would it be better to further optimise http://www.harrisbassett.co.uk/accounting.htm and include the phrases Accountants Swansea and Auditors Swansea or would this act against the homepage?

Sorry for the questions I am just looking for the best route forward to further boost the ranking on additional terms as the majority of the 1st page listings seem to weak?

[SimonCullum]

Hi there

A good question.  It seems that you already know the right way forwards;  your second option of re-focusing the page  http://www.harrisbassett.co.uk/accounting.htm  seems like the better option to go for.

Trying to get one page (such as the homepage in the case of your question) to rank for too many terms risks turning that page into a Frankenpage. To explain what that is, check out a fab White Board Friday video here on SEOmoz, entitled "Mapping Keywords to Content for Maximum Impact"

Hope that helps,

Regards

Simon

[idv]

Hi Simon

So on the re-focusing of http://www.harrisbassett.co.uk/accounting.htm would the best approach be - have a title of

Accountants Swansea | Auditors Swansea - Harris Bassett Accountants

And then in the copy of the page include around 5 instances of 'accountants swansea' and 'auditors swansea' within the web copy and alt tags.  Is it worth re-writing the URL to accountants-auditors-swansea.html ?

If this approach is ok is there anything else that would also help with the strategy?

[SimonCullum]

Hi again,

If those are your selected targeted keywords, then yes, that seems like a great structure for a title:

Accountants Swansea | Auditors Swansea  or even better for the user experience/search snippet,  Accountants & Auditors in Swansea

though minus the 'Harris Bassett Accountants' at the end, it's unnecessary (though opinion differs on that).

Having the company name at the end of each Title is a waste of space in my general opinion, only need them on pages like the Homepage, the About page and Contact page, unless Branding really is a concern across the site.  This is because Harriss Bassett is in your domain name, I'd suggest either making use of those extra spare characters in the Title for additional keywords, or leaving it shorter to really focus on the primary keywords

By changing the URLs to include the word Swansea, you really would be just targeting Swansea.  If this is fine for the foreseeable future then go for it, just be sure to correctly implement 301 Redirects on the current URL(s) to the new ones and request that your valuable links be changed to point to the new URLs so that none of that link juice is lost through the redirects.

So long as your Contact page has a local Swansea address and landline telephone number, and the word Swansea is in the title of appropriate pages, then it's unlikely you'd need to change the URLs to include 'Swansea', the fewer changes the better, usually.

I'd suggest making sure that your keyword research is spot-on for you and focus on including those keywords in prominent places in your main page copy, without over-doing it.

Regards

Simon

[idv]

What about link building I have been using opensiteexplorer to see what the sites in the top10 results for my targetted search phrase of 'accountants swansea' are listed on and have submitted to some of these directories although not the paid ones which many seem to have done

.But so far I have only built links coming in to the homepage, should I also look and building links to this internal page also with the link anchor if possible being 'accountants swansea'?

Along with directories I would be interested in hearing experts views on link building opportunities for a local accountant - creating widgets etc would not be viable as we dont have the resources to build such tools, articles again would be limited mainly to to time and resourcing constraints.

Any other suggestions that would give the strategy the edge over the current top 10, many of which I am at a loss to explain how they are currently above me in the results - so again if any one can enlighten me I would be very interested in your thoughts