I'm a loan officer seeking the best advice on how to position myself on Google's results given the following (city names changed): My target market lives in Sunny Valley, a region containing the cities of Happytown, Joyville and Loveland Currently I own HappyTownLending.com, JoyvilleLending.com, and LoveLandLending.com, as well as SunnyValleyLending.com. Currently I'm part of a few online networks that would allow me to point some quality links at ONE, maybe two, sites. Should I just focus all my efforts (and links) on developing SunnyValleyLending.com? The trouble is that I don't think many people would query "Sunny Valley home loan", I think they're going to be more likely to query "Happytown Home Loan", or one of the other cities. Should I try to develop content on each of the city.com sites and have them point to SunnyValleyLending, or should I try an optimize one of the city.com websites since they'll be more likely to be queried? Is it possible to SEO SunnyValleyLending.com to simultaneously rank for happytown home loan, loveland home loan, and joyville home loan, or is that too many keywords?
Something like: SunnyValleyLending.com/happytown-home-loan SunnyValleyLending.com/loveland-home-loan SunnyValleyLending.com/joyville-home-loan Will be 2 much helpful !!!
Yeah, WTF? I think it was a pretty legit question. My advice, which is an inexpert one, is to go for the sunny valley lending site as your primary, strong site, and does as dpking suggests and make pages targeting those keywords. 1 strong site will be better than 3 weak ones (of course, that assumes you can make the one strong). A word of caution...at one point, you will be tempted to buy links. Unless you're stealthy about it, you run the risk of a google smackdown, which will be counter to what you're trying to accomplish. Resist the urge to buy that PR6 finance site link until you know what you're doing/buying. And just so you know, this thread already ranks for your domain name...just fyi, in case somebody types your URL into Google, which people do do.
for sure you can. the keywords you are picking are not competitive at all. just incorporate the keywords in you site with 3-4% keyword density for each keyword (you can use http://keyworddensity.com/ to check the KW density), make one unique page for each KW and again do onpage optimization. and finally you will need some backlinks. try to get as much backlinks as possible with the keyword in anchor text. read the forum on link building and see how you can get some backlinks.
Thanks for the replies and advice everyone. I think I'll move forward with a strong central site and really gear for those keywords and gradually build links over time. Additionally, I'll keep lurking around here and see if I can't learn a thing or two.
I would actually go for a few more sites. Basically grab some niche related domains that will link to your site, (while still providign some valuable information). ::emp::
Adding to what emp was saying... You could develop some individual content sites about Happytown, Joyville and Loveland. You could post local information, pictures and events in the towns. Build these sites up and then point links to your individual pages on the SunnyValleyLending site.
To emp & dspohn: So if I understand right, you'd go for developing content sites about each of the cities in SunnyValley, then have those content sites link to a central lending site, basically making all those niche sites into "feeder" sites. That does make a lot of sense, although it'll also require a lot more work, but I suppose there's no getting out of that.