Seo For 50 States: Separate Domains Or Not Options

[naknek]

I am designing websites for my office. We are a lawfirm and will be advertising legal services in each state. I am wondering how to design the site(s)?

For an example we will have something like:

Alabamasocialsecurityattorney
Californiasocialsecurityattorney, etc.

There will be 1 for each state. There will be significant State info to make the pages/sites different, ie, links to state offices, links to a variety of lawfirms in the state, etc.

My questions are as follows:

1. Should I set up a separate domain for each state?

Or, should I have one basic domain and then separate pages for each state?

It seems that having the state name in the domain will help with seo? Is this correct? I do understand the maintenance issues for separate domains.

2. If I have separate domains for each state, will it matter if I have them all hosted by the same provider, or should I use a bunch of different providers?

3. Does anyone have any other thoughts on how to best do this?

Thanks in advance

[Jill]

Subdomains is a good way to go for that sort of thing.

[Randy]

It seems that having the state name in the domain will help with seo? Is this correct?

No, this is not correct. Not all by itself anyway.

Sounds like a lot of work to me, maintaining 50 domains. Personally I'd go with one site, then have sections for each state. Either as subdomains like Jill mentions or as a subdirectory for each state.

[donp]

1 site. Make it drop-dead fast and easy to find local offices.

[Orpheus Descendi...]

For an example we will have something like:

Alabamasocialsecurityattorney
Californiasocialsecurityattorney, etc.

I would strongly suggest doing some keyword research before you go any further. It is more likely that the term 'social security attorney california' will be more searched than 'california social security attorney.' Make sure you're researching all the permutations of this keyword phrase before deciding your naming convention. Are people looking for 'attorney' and then modifying for 'social security' or are they looking for 'social security' and then modifying for 'attorney'? I would bet that the difference between how these terms are modified (in terms of search volume) is larger than you've imagined - and people looking for an attorney are probably more likely to need one in the social security area, than people looking for information about social security are going to need an attorney.

Your title tags, file names and meta descriptions will be important for location modifiers in a site of this size, but if you write the copy well, your pages should clearly target each location naturally.

[youngcougentrepr...]

I would recommend doing 1 website with folders. So for example you would have like www.youdomain.com/state

It will be much easier to maintain and also will make link building tasks much simpler for you as you will have to worry about building links into one website instead of building links into 50 seperate websites. Also, the one website will look more like an authority website to the search engines because it will have much more content. You will be much happier if you go with one website and use folders.

[SERPico]

What about linking structure guys?

1: Linking to each state page residing in it's own folder or subdomain from the home page with "state" + "social security attorney" as an anchor link?
2: Create a sitemap page called social security attorneys by state and then link to each state page with an anchor link containing "state" + "social security attorney"?

I've seen sites, well established sites doing the "state" +"keyword(s)" anchor link to separate pages created for that state, thus they would have 50 or so anchor links pointing from the home page to state pages.

But i've also seen established sites linking to what you could call a sitemap page that would contain "state" +"keyword(s)" anchor links to each state page.

It's of course not only something that can be applied to states but also to provinces or countries, simply locations in overall or other identifiers followed by keyword(s).

What would be advantages or disadvantages of both methods?

Possible disadvantage: Having descriptive anchor links from the home page pointing to inner pages about the subject the anchor links describes is a good thing, but would having to many of these type of links, which would result in a lot of repetition of keywords apart from the identifier (i.e. "state") anchor links be a problem?


Thanks!

[SERPico]

No thoughts guys? (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[Randy]

My first thought is that no matter where you put it it's going to look pretty spammy to have 50 links appearing as:

Alabama Social Security Attorneys
Alaska Social Security Attorneys
Arizona Social Security Attorneys
Arkansas Social Security Attorneys
California Social Security Attorneys

Personally, I think you'd be better served by having a heading over the entire section being Social Security Attorney's By State, then the anchor text simply being the state name.

You can repeat the social security attorneys bit along with the state in the <title> of the target page.

[EGS]

Use subdomains or subdirectories.

IE, for NJ, you can structure your links/pages like this:

nj.yourlawsite.com/social-security-attorneys

or

yourlawsite.com/nj/social-security-attorneys

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

[SERPico]

My first thought is that no matter where you put it it's going to look pretty spammy to have 50 links appearing as:

Alabama Social Security Attorneys
Alaska Social Security Attorneys
Arizona Social Security Attorneys
Arkansas Social Security Attorneys
California Social Security Attorneys

Personally, I think you'd be better served by having a heading over the entire section being Social Security Attorney's By State, then the anchor text simply being the state name.

You can repeat the social security attorneys bit along with the state in the <title> of the target page.

Thanks for confirming what i suspected Randy, i'll use the folder approach like EGS suggested as well.

Cheers guys!

[Gtwlabs]

@ Jill, Why Peoples are Not Thinking about sub Folders instead of Subdomains , which one is the best for optimization and SERP ??

what would be the best ideas for our site "Subdomain or Subfolder ?

Please explain when ever you've Minutes.

Thanks
Eric

[Randy]

which one is the best for optimization and SERP ??

Neither is best for those purposes. One is as good as the other. And the other is as good as one.

[tstolber]

Hi Guys, first post here

I would add that if you use 50 different sub directories you can set a specific Geographical Location for each subdirectory in Google Webmaster Tools.

This is ideal for targetting 50 different states.

Not only does sub directories get around your Geo Targetting problem but you will also come up for local searches in each of the 50 different states fore all of your targetted keywords.

That is exactly what you want in this scenario.

[piskie]

For me there is one clear choice leaving everything else as second best. I would have no hesitation in setting the whole thing up with a sub directory for each state:
domain.com/state