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I have a website design client who wishes to rank for several cities they are willing to service locally.

I have seen a competitor do this,

Main-site.com/web-design

content all about web design

subcategories

main-site.com/web-design/city-name-website-designer

Content about web design plus content about the city itself and hiring a website designer in that city

main-site.com/web-design/next-city-name-website-designer

Content about web design plus content about the next city itself and hiring a website designer in that city

Is this a great strategy, it seems to be working for them, or will Google eventually penalize this  ?

Or would you just put all 4 city names in the title and descriptions and content on one page ?

All great answers for sure ...

Don't forget this resource right here on Seomoz itself,

Have a look through to see which ones may relate to and be beneficial to your company.

http://www.seomoz.org/directories

Great answer Irving,

I agree,

You don't want to go too many categories deep...

www.your-site.com/category-keyword1/category-keyword2/main-content-article-here

Try to naturally fit your keywords in the URL.

I find helps with ranking potential.

Because of seo best practices i like to keep my URL lengths within Seomoz  recommendations of below 115 characters.

I agree with David,

Take the time to do it right, less links but higher quality links are the way to go, if you are not up to it , you can pay someone to do the high quality link building for you.

it may save your behind in the long run !

Hello David,

When you install wordpress it installs the files which can be found with or without the www.

On the settings page you can add the www as the version you want to use.

What is going on in the back that allows this ? => ( .htacess file re-write rules)

Your host should have rewrite rule available via  .htacess file This will rewite all the pages on the site to which ever version you choose.

then in your webmaster account choose the www. version as well.

Redirecting your site to one version or the other is going to reduce two versions of your site down to one version so you do not have duplicate content issues or penalties.

I always use the full url (absolute link) with the www.for several reasons below.

This should always be used in your links within your site and the code as well.

Absolute link example is = http://www.your-site-url.com

• easier and faster for search engines to follow

• safer when worried about site hijacking

• works better in emails ( make sure a visitor gets to the right page)

• better if your content gets stolen and the thief does not take time to check and fix all the code (i actually caught someone who stole one of my sites content this way )

If you use one version all the time you are also going to make sure you get all your link benefits to the right domain and not split between the two.

Some seo's and many web designers don't use the full url to save time and code bloat of the site. Myself as  well as many other think the absolute link has added benefits.

I hope that helps.

Well,

I would like a general answer about the DA, PA and MR for sure.

However these particular pages are from directories listed here on SEOMOZ's list of directories worth exploring.

All would be links in a category for my site.

There are both free listings

and a fee to review the listing option. ( considered a paid link ?)

I am doing some link building and was hoping to get some clear information about the quality of the links and what I need to build a higher domain trust and authority.

My sites page I wish to build for has: DA 22   PA 33  MR 4.6

I am looking at back links with these figures

Considering outbound links are equal, which pages can help build my page ?

page1   DA 66 PA 48 MR 4.8

page2   DA 66 PA 35 MR 3.75

page 3  DA 66 PA  28 MR 3.5

page 4  DA  41 PA 18 MR 2.73

Page 4  DA 41 PA 18 MR 1.87

Do I need back links with a Domain Authority Higher than my own ?

PA higher than my own ?

or MR higher than my own ?

or would any of these pages be able to improve my own ?

Thank you in advance for helping with this as I do not want to spend 6 months building the wrong links.

Sorry casey,

All pages are on the same domain with DA of 65

How Much better is a do follow backlink from these 3 pages

PA of 28 with 12 outbound do follow links

compared to a PA of 31 with 16 out bound links ?

Compared to a PA of 42 with 35 out links ?

How different would the link juice be from these 3 pages with the do follow links as described ?

What has been your experience ?

Its not so straight forward as which gets better results for seo. Both can rank very well based on how they are optimized. you can have a great looking wordpress site that is set up for great seo that can easily out rank a poorly optimized HTML site. and vice versa.

Again I would say there is no hard rule and that either type of site when built and optimized well cna have a greater crawl rate and results than the other.

The expense part will depend on the design company you choose, it will depend on how much customization and seo work have to go into the site to get what you want.

Pros,

If you are building a site yourself the the pros would probably go to wordpress as it comes with a basic set up and easy plug ins to get seo friendly right away.

If you are hiring a firm - they should know how to make the most of either type.

cons,

No cons unless your design firm is not familiar with one or the other type of site.

I think you should look for an SEO specialist or Internet Marketing company who also builds websites. This way you can be assured the website design team are building your website with Seo in mind from the beginning.

Some web design firms can be a great graphics or creative web company but no little about search engines and seo.

Questions to ask a website design company ?

1. What are the top meta tags you will use to help my site rank well ?

2. Are they going to build your site with HTML, or flash ?

3. Which CMS Are they going to install on your site and how will they optimize it ?

4. Do they have samples of clients sites that they have ranked well for ?

5. What built in seo systems do they use for building sites ?

Once you re design your site you want to consider off site seo, link building and traffic generation techniques to increase rankings and sales.

Also not directly related to seo and being crawled - if you are re-doing the site you may want to spend some time on CRO = conversion rate optimization to make sure you are getting the most return from the traffic and rankings you will recieve.

Hello Marcus,

Thank you for the quick reply.

I am new on here and want to try and understand better.

I have a tanning salon and have just gotten a new spray tan booth that is a bit different than most as its open concept so the client does not breath in the over spray. in my opinion its a little safer than most spray tan machines.

I want to get my spray tan page ranked #1  in my small city low competition, and thought the press release would generate enough links and exposure to get that done.

In general will the live links on the press release hosted on pr webs site help in this regard ?

Or does the press release have to be linked to by others to get the value ?

or am I totally way off base ?

I am thinking of doing some press releases from PRWEB. they offer a press release with live links for better seo effect. Is this really effective ? Has any one seen this to be benficial ?

Thank you so much for your time and valuable help.

I was reading how important it was to write quality content , but where where do I get the proper guidelines. I am glad I am here at SEOMOZ. It seems like this is where I will get the proper education and direction I need.

So, if I cleaned up my website and took some of the obvious blatant keywords out , should I expect to lose some ranking ?

Or is that part of the puzzle not even neccesary ?

Also,

Is it possible you may have a website url of some examples of a website done and written really well ?

Thank you Once Again.

I cannot express how much I appreciate the help.

Thank you for helping.

When you say content marketing - I thought that was the article was ?

How would the content and article marketing differ ?

Also I saw a reference to a link directory list on the SEOMOZ site here somewhere...

Are those the sites that I should be trying to get links from initially ?

Please forgive my innocence.

When you say spammy, do you mean

1. having the keywords to many times in the article ?

2. Using an article site period ?

3. The anchor text ?

Again thank you for taking the time to help me understand this better.

I was thinking maybe not, thank you for confirming.

Thank you for taking the time to answer.

Question, what do you mean by the anchors ? What would be a better way to do the anchor text ?

There seems soo much to learn.

This article site has a PR5

my article with author bio here, has no PR

http://goarticles.com/article/A-Guide-to-an-At-Home-Spray-on-Tan/6531453/

Is this type of link of any value ?

Thank you in advance,

Joe