Our old Website develping company kept telling us, they were going to put the name of the major market cities and several keywords at the footer of every page on our website in 8pt. type. They said it would help our SEO dramaticly? Like most things on our project, they were all talk and little action, never completing this. Does it help or hurt? It seems like something I saw on sites 5 years ago? Anyone have thoughts?
It won't help you pagerank-wise at all. And yeah, excessive crosslinking may seriously hurt you. Do an intelligent link structure, find a few top links and do intelligent linking based on country, city, etc... Just pasting 20 cities in 8px font will indeed look like you are working 5 years back.
Won't be very helpful since all backlinks are coming from same site. But, it will still help either way.
I see a debate brewing, We are a product site design so "looks matter" but nothing matters with out traffic. I am a little confused with " -It won't help you pagerank-wise at all. And yeah, excessive crosslinking may seriously hurt you. Do an intelligent link structure, find a few top links and do intelligent linking based on country, city, etc... - we hadn't discussed cross linking in this thread- can you elaborate?
Hey there, Have 2 or 3 keywords in the footer is great. However, do not stuff all your keywords togather there as it is considered keyword stuffing. Sincerely, Travis Walters
I have some navigation links in the footer of http://www.vbulletinsetup.com Is this what you are referring too ? It will help all pages get indexed, just don't stuff 50 or 100 links/keywords in with them and you should be good. Don't try and hide the links by changing the text color, and don't make them to small and you should be good. cheers -Brandon
NO, its about putting keywords just above your navigation structure just like I have it on my movie site.
I don't know why other posters are commenting on links. I don't see any reference to linking here at all (read it 3 times and still don't see it). Yes, putting city names and keywords in the footer of every page is a very old tactic, and I don't think it works any more. Search engines have become far more sophisticated. A simple list of keywords anywhere on a page normally has very little effect. SEs look at sentence, paragraph, and page structure and expect keywords to be used naturally. I'm sure some people on this board can provide examples of some pages where it has worked, but I think that generally it has little to no effect. Plus, I think it's a real "turn-off" for visitors. When I come across a page like that it makes me feel like the site owner is cheating, so I normally leave the site quickly. So maybe your old web developer did you a favor by never getting around to doing it. Good basic content that is keyword rich without overdoing it is a better approach IMO. /*tom*/
Putting relevant keyword at footer will help. However putting major city names that has no relevant to your site might even backfire you. There are debates all over the place about Google and LSI. To play safe, if you think those keywords are not related at all, don't put it.
It's hard to say what's best without seeing the site, also remember the first content on the page generally has more importance placed on it and it tapers off towards the footer. So a few words stuck down there won't hold alot of weight in highly competative searches.. But should pull up in the SERP's in long tail, low result queries. Personally i'd create additional pages targeting various locations, this way you can utilize the more powerful page Title, Description, <h1> Tags and also internal anchor text when linking to these pages. No need to create dozens of pages for each town, just do a few State pages and reference the Major Cities in that state along with your product keywords in a few paragraph write up.
I would tend to only use footer links to deep link into pages that you are wanting to bring to the attention of Google. If you have created a new page which is hidden somewhere like yoursite.com/page1/page2/newpage.html Other than that as sweetfunny said, you should perhaps create targeted pages for these terms so you can pick up some long tail traffic.
Thank you SweetFunny, ypu win the class moserator award here. That is what I am looking for True valuation of my thoughts. Chewie I also like your comments and explains all the talk about linking. I sall use lightly, Thanks
Here is my experience with doing this and keep in mind I am fairly new to SEO. I have a site that has the 10 major cities in a state listed as part of the body on SOME of my pages and not as links. Ex. We do business in the following major cities in the state of ohio: blah blah blah blah The benefit I have seen with doing this on a page that also has quality content is picking up long tail keywords associated with one of those 10 cities. I do not think it would hurt you to do this although it will not help that much. I do pick up long tail keywords with the city and some of my quality keyword rich content from this though. my 2 cents...
I agree with your point that it is worthless but the average user doesn't care or even notice such things
its good to put keywords on the site's footer but be sure to limit it. Putting several keywords is keyword stuffing which is unethical.