Questions
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NAP Questions
Hey Gannon, Good questions! Quick answers: Yes, you should be using the business name exactly as it appears in the real world. So, no extra capitals. Think about a huge chain like Whole Foods. Google has no problem understanding that Whole Foods located in Dallas is not Whole Foods located in Boston. As Dmitri has said, it's your address/phone that separate the businesses. So, do be sure the phone numbers are separate. Additionally, be sure you have a separate page on the website for each branch and be sure that all other citations are consistently pointing to the respective landing page for the correct location instead of to the homepage or some other page on the site. With this strategy, your client should be just fine.
Local Listings | | MiriamEllis0 -
Second location
Hi Gannon! Let's take a look together at a well optimized multi-location business like REI.com. Just one site for the brand, but great little pages for each location. See this: http://www.rei.com/stores/corte-madera.html Look at the super effort that is being made to include unique content on this city landing page versus the many other cities in which this company has stores. To me, this is the best possible business model for any multi-location local business. All possible benefits accrue to the overall brand rather than being split up between a bunch of different websites, while individual city landing pages benefit from the strength of the overall brand. I am not a fan of a multi-site approach for local businesses. I am much more in favor of every effort you make strengthening the overall website and brand at a single source. A way I find helpful to think about this is: Core pages like Home, About, Products, Services - optimized for the brand. Locational pages like city landing pages, Contact and blog posts - optimized for brand+ location And, yes, you'll want to build a completely new set of citations for the 2nd location, and, if you decide to create a landing page on the site for the 1st location, as you have for the 2nd, you should edit the original citations to reflect the new landing page instead of the homepage. Will you lose rankings? It's possible that you could temporarily, but if the business is on the verge of expanding, you have to think to the future and have a strategy for properly marketing each of the locations as they are developed. Definitely look at the way REI has done this. I find them to be a great role model!
Local Listings | | MiriamEllis0 -
XML Sitemap Questions For Big Site
Thanks for the input guys! I believe Twitter and Facebook don't run sitemaps for their profiles, what they have is a directory for all their profiles (twitter: https://twitter.com/i/directory/profiles Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/find-friends?ref=pf) and use that to get their profiles crawled, however I feel the best approach is through xml sitemaps and Google plus actually does this with their profiles (http://www.gstatic.com/s2/sitemaps/profiles-sitemap.xml) and quite frankly I would rather follow Google then FB or Twitter... I'm just now wondering how the hell they upkeep that monster! Does it create a new sitemap everything one hits 50k? When do they update their sitemap? daily, weekly, or monthly and how? One other question I have is if their is any penalties to getting a lot of pages crawled at once? Meaning one day we have 10 pages and the next we have 10,000 pages or 50,000 pages... Thanks again guys!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | keywordwizzard0