Is there a distinct advantage to having the word "Real Estate" after all of your communities on your Nav Bar? For example "City Real Estate" going all the way down for every different community or city you have? Or is this just spamming?

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MARK Z. Real Estate Team

Coldwell Banker Real Estate
Northville, MI 48168
(248) 937-1337
Northville MI Real Estate
Michigan Divorce Attorney
Metro Detroit Real Estate Blog

Servicing the entire Metropolitan Detroit Real Estate market. If you know of anyone looking to relocate to Michigan, call me with their name and number. I am willing to pay you up to a 30% referral fee.

Good question Mark! I can't wait to see the answers to this for I know the situation you find yourself in. Do I use those phrases or not in the menu structure? I have navigation menu items where "City Real Estate" will not fit without wrapping and looking terrible so just use the city name and the target page is titled and of course focused on "City Real Estate".

I have seen one of the prominent and informed Atlanta members of this forum use the phrase over and over and assume he has found it not to be troublesome however I would limit it to less than 3 "City Real Estate" phrases in the menu system for safe measures.

Again, I can't wait for REW member responses and hope when they offer opinions they also disclose how they would feel if the phrase was used in repeatedly in submenus. One would think that the SE's rcognize the site is related to Real Estate and that having a menu item that is "just the city name" going to a page that is focused on "City Real Estate" would be relevant and quality material for good ranking. The keyword string would be found on the subpage on a relevant and quality site and should index well IMHO.

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Cal
Orange Beach Condos | Gulf Shores Condos | Keller Williams Gulf States

The Gulfshoreslife.com Team serves the Baldwin County Alabama Real Estate market from The Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay to the Southern Shores of the Alabama Gulf Coast: Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, Fort Morgan, Point Clear, Fairhope, Montrose, Daphne, Spanish Fort, AL. Referals are welcomed. For more information on AL Gulf Coast Real Estate, please contact me or visit our website.

Sarasota Association of Realtors

I personallly think it looks spammy and don't like having to find what I am looking for by sorting through links that all look the same. My suggestion - if you need to have keywords in your link text, incorporate them in the text on the page, and have a lot of quality content about your area. Hope that's helpful!

Cal,
Thats exactly my problem if I put real estate on every city name it will wrap around and I think it looks terrible. I was also thinking we have Real Estate enough times on the site, but I just thought to have the keyword of each city name plus real estate would just be another feather in our hat. But again with the wrap around it's hard to make it look right. I have seen some people make the text smaller and therefore get it to fit. Lets see what the rest think.

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MARK Z. Real Estate Team

Coldwell Banker Real Estate
Northville, MI 48168
(248) 937-1337
Northville MI Real Estate
Michigan Divorce Attorney
Metro Detroit Real Estate Blog

Servicing the entire Metropolitan Detroit Real Estate market. If you know of anyone looking to relocate to Michigan, call me with their name and number. I am willing to pay you up to a 30% referral fee.

It comes down to readibility - you will not get a penalty or anything for it, but if it does not look good to you, it won't look good to your visitors - I don't do it myself, nor do I feel the need to (There may or may not be a slight benefit in terms of internal anchor text) but it is certainly not worth effecting your visitors perception in a negative manner.

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I think I might be that "Atlanta guy"...

I'll tell you what...I knew nothing when I started and as I built more pages, I just sort of left it and went with the way I started. Frankly, I would prefer to not see it, but, have been afraid to change it.

I'll do a test...with one page.

Google "brookhaven real estate" and I am #6 - it fluctuates between 4 and 6.

For this page (and only this page ) I will remove "real estate" and see what happens. It will be a little test for all of us. If it doesn't change my rankiings for that term, I will remove them slowly.

I suspect, however, that I will be off of page one within 2 weeks.

..............ok, it's removed. Now let's wait and see.

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Ryan Ward, REALTOR® - Keller Williams Realty Consultants. (404) 630-3187
Atlanta Real Estate - My featured area is Alpharetta Real Estate and it is where I call home. Read my Atlanta Real Estate blog.

I tried that test a few months back Ryan. I tested both my city real estate and neighborhood real estate pages. What I found was of course, that I dropped in city real estate results, but then climbed on the city name or city, state page results. Same for the neighborhood pages.

When I compared the analytic data to the results, I found that I got more active visits and registrations with the city/neighborhood real estate pages. Since I changed it back, I have also not only climbed back up on the city or neighborhood real estate pages but have also continued to climb for the city or city, state pages too. So, even thought I may not like the look, the results are what matters most to me.

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Benjamin Dona, Broker/Owner
Gulf Coast Associates, Realtors
Metro Mortgage Company
Bonita Springs Real Estate | Florida Home Loans | Naples Real Estate

Ryan,
Now you made this interesting...I just checked right now, & you are currently #6 on google, so I am very curious to see how this affects your status.

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MARK Z. Real Estate Team

Coldwell Banker Real Estate
Northville, MI 48168
(248) 937-1337
Northville MI Real Estate
Michigan Divorce Attorney
Metro Detroit Real Estate Blog

Servicing the entire Metropolitan Detroit Real Estate market. If you know of anyone looking to relocate to Michigan, call me with their name and number. I am willing to pay you up to a 30% referral fee.

Yup... I suspect this will be a short lived test.

There is more to the rationale than I gave in the earlier thread...

I don't try to rank my homepage for "brookhaven real estate".

I try to rank my "Brookhaven Real Estate" page.

There are a number of reasons, but, mostly it has to do with the way I view the website as a hole and the CTR which would be much better as landing pages for people who actually search for "brookhaven real estate"

Should they land on the Brookhaven real estate page or the Atlanta real estate page? the answer is simple...The rankings are a bit more difficult.

Instead of having multiple sites for multiple areas, I simply think of each page as its own website (with the luxury of automatically being connected to all of the surrounding areas).

So for me, it seems much more natural to actually have "Brookhaven Real Estate" in the nav bar.

That's the page I want people to land on and that's the best anchor text to help me rank for the page.

Nonetheless, I will stick through my test and report back.

I would rather not have it for aesthetic reasons, but for me, form follows function and since it functions better (for SERPS) I will likely be going back to it.

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Ryan Ward, REALTOR® - Keller Williams Realty Consultants. (404) 630-3187
Atlanta Real Estate - My featured area is Alpharetta Real Estate and it is where I call home. Read my Atlanta Real Estate blog.

I know what you mean! I am scared to change, add, edit, remove or do anything on our Lake Lanier site.

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Cal
Orange Beach Condos | Gulf Shores Condos | Keller Williams Gulf States

The Gulfshoreslife.com Team serves the Baldwin County Alabama Real Estate market from The Eastern Shore of Mobile Bay to the Southern Shores of the Alabama Gulf Coast: Orange Beach, Gulf Shores, Fort Morgan, Point Clear, Fairhope, Montrose, Daphne, Spanish Fort, AL. Referals are welcomed. For more information on AL Gulf Coast Real Estate, please contact me or visit our website.

Sarasota Association of Realtors