To many pages to optimise for

okay, all the pages Im trying to optimise for are base around the same subject (as if you haven’t guessed)

I’m trying to optimise for this for each location in my country and for many subjects!

I have a separate page for each of these, the URL contains the keywords, the pages are well linked with relevant anchor text, and the page titles have the keywords. The pages contain relevant links using relevant anchor text (still all internal though)

- But its so competitive to do this, since I think I still need to get relevant inbound links to EACH PAGE from relevant sites.

What would your suggested strategy be to do this? Do you think I should concentrate on just a few pages to begin with and get many inbound links for them. Or concentrate on all the pages (many thousand) and gets just a few for each page?

Hi Tutor,

My suggestion would be to start with as few pages as you can reasonably use in order to fully present all of the meaningful content your site has to offer.
(Bigger site/more pages = more backlinks required in order to just get the site indexed, before you can even start thinking about competing at a high level).

It's really not necessary to have an entire page for each location (that's a little "2005"); you must have a lot of unnecessary pages with high %'age duplication...

You can rank for "location-specific kw's" (without even mentioning the location,. much less building a page for it) simply by getting a link or two in a local directory/portal, a few links with the location in the anchor or by geo-targetting within GWT... So - mention the locations (rather than building pages for them), get the "local links" and you can save a lot of time/expense/hassle.

Of course - if you've built the site already, it's too late

You really don't need to get links to every single page on the site but - if you have the location-specific pages - you may as well make sure that any "local portal links" go to the relevant pages.

hmmm, I have actually noticed that I get a lot of hits on the pages that contain a few key words for the area-subject and not the pages that are specifically designed for the area-subject

This might be due to these pages being well referenced internally from highly related pages. (as well as having relevantly anchored external inbound links)

The thing is, the pages are designed by the people that use them, so the chance of duplication should be relatively low.

I have started to prompt the users to get inbound links their selves; (I think I have a good link strategy idea for this).

But if I have thousands upon thousands of pages all with only a few links on them (and all link back to the main page), will this be highly beneficial? or would it be better to concentrate on getting thousands of inbound links to the main page?

I know at least I should get some traffic to the site from the inbound links to the many thousand pages, so its not a complete waste of time. However, should I really be concentrating on getting my users to link back to the main page (or handful of pages) some how?

I know that if I tried to focus on hundreds of pages nothing would really get done. When you shoot a shotgun, it does a lot of damage but it is very spread out. Where as if you concentrate on your best selling or specific pages/keywords you will move those up, and over time of your link juice flowing it will go into the other pages and move them up in Google also. So in a lot of cases I try not to take a shotgun approach and hope that if I do enough damage something good will come of it.

This may not have directly answered your question, but I wish you the best of luck.

Thanks exodusms, I think it did answer my question. I should concentrate all my efforts on the handful of pages for now. Later this will spread through out the site anyway..
cheers

well i suggest to create different titles for each pages..
which i believe one of the most important...

Yup, that’s already done automatically for each user