External Linking and SEO strategy

[BrianJenkins]

I run a business where we offer music lessons in student's homes throughout a local area.  We currently rank for phrases like piano lessons + city, or voice lessons + city because we have a page specifically made for each keyword + city combination.  The result is a very spammy looking site.

I'm afraid that eventually this duplicate content will be penalized especially when we move into hundreds of cities throughout the US.  With that in mind, I came up with a system that would give each page original content specific to the keyword + city.  Whenever we hire a new teacher the teacher must fill out a short teaching philosophy which will be displayed next to their picture on pages where they can teach.  I go through the teaching philosophy and add a keyword or two for search engines as well.

For example someone who can teach piano lessons in Los Angeles would appear on the piano lessons in Los Angeles page.  This way I have some more original content.  I am also going to systematically ask for testimonials from all of our customers which will then be displayed on the respective pages as well.  Therefore the more teachers and students we get, the more content we have available on our site.

With that said, I'm still trying to think of ways to make a better user experience with more specific content on each page.  Recently I was looking through whiteboard Fridays and found this video:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/external-linking-good-for-seo-whiteboard-friday

I thought it may be a good idea if I went out and found perhaps local sheet music stores and added them to my database.  Then I would link out to them on specific pages, saying "this is where you can go to buy sheet music" or "buy a trumpet here".  It would be a lot more elegant than that, but hopefully you get the idea.  My entire site is database driven so as soon as I put the new stores information in the database it could show up on the instrument/city pages within 10 miles of the store, or something like that.

I'm posting this for opinions.  Is this a good strategy?  Some of my worries are that these other businesses almost all provide lessons in their store, so they would be direct competitors.  I also really don't want to detract from what I'm selling, which are lessons.  I'm worried about conversion rates mostly.

The positives to the approach though may be that I can get some good linking to these individual pages from these stores (if they'll link to a competitor), which is something that would be very difficult to do for these deep instrument+city pages.  Also I'm thinking if I included the stores physical address then perhaps search engines would be more encouraged that the instrument+city page actually represents a local service.

Any ideas and thoughts are greatly appreciated!

[myclicks-163603]

Hi Brian,

The strategy looks good. The user experience is the most important element here as you will have to give the users relevant and well organized content. You can also consider adding additional elements like:

1. zip codes

2. price rage of the lessons (it will additionally give you an option to add classifiers like cheap, affordable, expensive, etc.

<classifier><instrument>lessons</instrument></classifier>

3. favoured (based on the rankings)

4. popular (based on usage and popularity)

Such elements can expand your potential exposure and you will surely generate more traffic pretty soon. You will still have unique content because you will be generating different results based on the elements chosen by the user, unique testimonials, etc.

I hope you have a custom search in place which will make the job for the users easier. But still you may add some quick links in the footer which will orientate them pretty well. For example:

Search by <city>,  Search by <instrument>Lessons, Search by Price, Search by Popularty and so on. Place 10-15 links under each of these classifiers and you will be . Of course you can do even better if you split the process in some logical steps like choosing the City first, Then the type of lesson, than the price or popularity. Feel free to contact me for any questions or suggestions that you might have.</instrument></city>

[C-Style]

I've employed a similar strategy for a client who has several lead generation websites. The have the ability to sell their "service" in many cities. I created several hundred landing pages specific to each city, I.E.- "credit counselor in san antonio texas". Believe it or not it worked very well. The nice thing about this strategy is that you don't have to do any heavy link building because in reality how many people are optimizing/creating content for these terms. This is the very definition of long-tail.

Although the search volume is much lower the conversion rates are through the roof.

Some things that I believed helped us:

1. Hand written, 100% unique articles.

2. Low-mid level keyword saturation. (7 instances per 500 words)

3. Avoiding keyword stuffing in titles.

4. Including a unique image with keyword in alt tag.

5. Including rich media (videos tagged as taking place within the geographic location)

6. Rolling out 2-3 pages per day.

I wouldn't pay much attention to the on-page stuff anymore. I built these pages last summer and perhaps focused too much on keyword usage. If you provide links to relevant external websites tag them with the "nofollow" attribute. They'll still be recognized as being relevant and you aren't spreading your link juice everywhere.