What is the best way to organize cities/communities on a front page for buyers and SEO? I have nearly 100 cities/communities that I have written content on and taken pictures of. I don't want to list all of the communities down the edge of the page but I would like to be optimized under each one since I have spent the time putting a page together each.

Is there a drop down menu that is actually search engine friendly? If so, should I list the five cities I sell in and then have the communities come up underneath them?

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Roxanne & Shannon Moore,
The Moore & Moore Team
North Port Florida Realtors
North Port Florida Real Estate
North Port Property

I would go with the 5 cities and list the communities on those pages. Make each city a network of communities linking to each other in that city like mini websites inside your site. Make sure all pages link to home page and all the other cities.

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Serving all your Outer Banks real estate needs and for the latest OBX events visit the Outer Banks Community Forum.

Bigtoe, this is helpful. I see the logic of linking all the community pages within a given city to the other communities within that city. What I'm not clear on: are you suggesting links from one city's various community pages to the other neighboring cities?

Yes. If they are looking at a community in one city they can easily click to another city and look at the communities there.

Plus the links going around will help seo.

In fact link all of the pages on your site to the 5 cities. Eventually the city pages will start to show up in the serps and you can get those long tail hits.

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Serving all your Outer Banks real estate needs and for the latest OBX events visit the Outer Banks Community Forum.

In my area I could do it by School district, or county, but in larger areas I can see how Bigtoes advice is best. Do it by city and communities within that city.

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Dave Kovaleski REALTOR
Pocono Pennsylvania Real Estate Agent
Pocono Real Estate
Pocono Homes
Lake Wallenpaupack Real Estate

But should I list the communities under the cities in a drop down menu? I'm going to mention many of these areas in the text throughout my front page with links over to the specific areas but I wanted a more organized way for buyers and SEO spiders to find the info.

I don't think I want to list the cities all the way down the side of the page although most of the websites that do it this way get very good results in the search engines. sellmeflorida.com has the cities running down the side of his page and gets good results. michaelsaunders.com//AreaInfo/Neighborhoods/AreaID/52.aspx also gets really good SE results.

I would rather have a drop down menu but there must be a reason why both websites have the cities running down the side of the page. My guess is SEO.

Bigtoe, will the spiders take a while to get the community pages because they are deeper than the front page? It's seems as though they might get indexed quicker if they were somehow on the front page??

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Roxanne & Shannon Moore,
The Moore & Moore Team
North Port Florida Realtors
North Port Florida Real Estate
North Port Property

I use CSS-based dropdown menus from cssplay.co.uk, which has a great variety of different styles which are all search engine friendly. One thing to be aware of is having the proper doctype declaration in your pages or it may not work exactly right in all browsers. The site does give instructions on how to use their code.

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Stacy Clifford
ChiliPepperWeb.net
Open-Realty Hosting

I've seen and liked sites that organize the communities via geography. west. central, north, etc. Then you can have the list of communities divided among the geographic divisions.

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Austin Texas Real Estate | Coldwell Banker Austin | Austin Texas Real Estate

Thanks for answering ChilliPepper & Joe!

Chillipepper I went and looked at the cssplay website, very cool site, it has a lot of different things I could use. I was wondering about displaying the pictures that I have taken and that site has some great options. BTW, I went and looked at your website and love the names of the different level packages, jalapeño, habanero, etc. The better the package the hotter the pepper. Very cute idea!

Joe, that's an idea about how to divide them, I'll try it out and see how it looks.

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Roxanne & Shannon Moore,
The Moore & Moore Team
North Port Florida Realtors
North Port Florida Real Estate
North Port Property

Thanks for showing us that css site Chili. As I continue to add content to my site and areas of service , my list of communities is growing way to big for my home page. Maybe wihththe help of those style sheets I can craft soome attractive drop down menus for my site.

Thanks a bunch!

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Dave Kovaleski REALTOR
Pocono Pennsylvania Real Estate Agent
Pocono Real Estate
Pocono Homes
Lake Wallenpaupack Real Estate