Portfolio page titles and urls

[NeilD]

This post is deleted!

[Vizergy]

As far as the file names, I would stay away from using website design in them as it is already in your domain.  My reason for this is from practical experience:

Our clients are very locally based - meaning all of their important shopping terms include their location (city).  Many times the domain name will include the city and for a long time it was standard practice to also include the city in different file names throughout the website.  Right around the time that Panda started up we noticed those specific pages starting to drop - pages that had the city in the file name on websites that also had the city in the domain.  Now, I know that correlation does not equal causation but when I started changing file names and we started seeing rankings come back.... well... I figured it was counting as Over Optimization.

As far as your titles and headers etc... I am sure this is fine, but I would certainly stay away from having the term repeat in the absolute URL by having it in both the domain and the file name.

Cheers!

[irvingw]

I don't know why you would want to target the locality.It's not like you will have 30 same name businesses in your portfolio in different locations. I would recommend:

<title>Funky Chicken Shack | Joe's Website Design | Client Portfolio</p> <p>http://www.joeswebsitedesign.co.uk/client-portfolio/funky-chicken-shack</p> <p>Main target for search is "Funky Chicken Shack"</p> <p>Secondary targets are long tail variations.</p> <p>Each page would need unique content written and not just images and screenshots of the site, and definitely not any content from the clients site.</p> <p> </p> <p> </p></title>

[NeilD]

Thanks guys, The reason I mentioned locality is because we are wanting to target for website design work in a specific area and clients in our portfolio will be from that area, hence the title to include the area or am I looking at this the wrong way when constructing portfolio pages?

[irvingw]

OK so no one will be searching for "website design in (town)" but may be searching for "website design in (state)"

a) I would add location to the title tag like below for exact match of "website design in state"

<title>Funky Chicken Shack | Joe's Website Design in State</title>

b) add "Joe's Website Design in State"  once in your content body

c) add the address in the content globally in the footer

d) add address microformatting to your address code

e) set up your Google places pages, verify and work on getting people to review you on there as much and positively as possible

f) for the URL you could do something like:

http://www.joeswebsitedesign.co.uk/(state)-portfilio/funky-chicken-shack or

http://www.joeswebsitedesign.co.uk/(state)-clients/funky-chicken-shack

or this which might get you ranked for people searching for that business by location

http://www.joeswebsitedesign.co.uk/portfilio/funky-chicken-shack-in-state

http://www.joeswebsitedesign.co.uk/clients/funky-chicken-shack-in-state

If you went this second route I would make the title tag

<title>Funky Chicken Shack in State | Joe's Website Design Portfolio</title>

[NeilD]

At the start of your reply you said:

"OK so no one will be searching for "website design in (town)" but may be searching for "website design in (state)"

When you say no one will be seaching for (town) - why do you say that?

[NeilD]

I agree, having "website design" in the file name as well as the domain name is probably asking for trouble, it doesn't look very nice either!