Advanced Access Blog

We have talked about the importance of having pages with unique content (unique on the Internet *and* unique within your site).  We hope you don’t bother copying that wikipedia content about your area onto your site.  Also, please don’t copy content from one page of your site and throw it on another.

In addition to the content being unique, you need your meta tags to be unique to each page as well.

If you are in Orange County, California, and you serve Anaheim, Orange and Yorba Linda you will want to at least have a page about each area.  You will want to talk about local real estate market conditions, recent comps, recreation, local events, activities, anything you can possibly think of that helps people learn more about your area.  But from *your* perspective, not a wikipedia article, not from your local city website.  You live there, and you have something no one else has: the ability to write about your city in your own words.  Another neat thing… link to just the listings for that city or area from each page as well… not sure how to do this?  Contact Customer Support and we’ll help you do it with ListNOW Farms.

On each of these “city” pages you will also want unique meta tags.  Your home page title may be something like Anaheim Real Estate - Yorba Linda Real Estate.  So would that apply to your page about Orange Real Estate?  Notsomuch.  And even if it is your Anaheim Real Estate page… how does Yorba Linda Real Estate really come into play?  It doesn’t.  So, make sure each page has its own meta title and description…don’t leave it at the default home page metas.

I can hear you saying now, though, “I want the search engines to know my site is about Anaheim Real Estate”…. “I want to have the best chance at ranking for Anaheim Real Estate”….”I want to be linked to with the anchor text Anaheim Real Estate”….

Yes, well I thought you’d say that… and I am not the only one… thankfully Rand Fishkin over at SEOMoz wrote a great post about Keyword Cannibalization and how to solve/avoid it.  He has some diagrams he posted and the quotes above are really his just altered to speak to the real estate folks here.  Rand gave some great advice about how to get out of the keyword cannibal rut.  Also, check out his post (including more fun illustrations) about duplicate content.  Check it all out, then get your content and metas up to speed ASAP!

Thanks to Rand for his diagrams which inspired the new version of my unique content and meta tags rant

This entry was posted on Monday, March 12th, 2007 at 12:27 pm and is filed under Product Education, Search Engine Tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.