similar pages problem..............

Hi all,

I have a website that I want to optimize for several important keywords. A bit of background info: the site's purpose is to advertise/describe a certain travel service.

I want to use nothing but 100% ethical SEO means.

My site is ahving a separate page for each city, optimized with keywords including the name of each individual city.

Each city's page will be linked from the homepage (in a list of available cities), but the links will be styled to look like regular text (ie, same color,underline).

The pages themselves will all basically act as an intro page for each respective city, and so will essentially have the same content except for the names of the city in the text. The title/h1 tags will also be different, being optimized with the name of the city.

I should also note that these pages will be about 90% similar to each other, with the only differences being a few slight variations in the wording of the text, different title tags, a different h1 header and (of course) the mention of specific cities.

Here's my question/concern:

Will search engines (google especially) penalize/ban the site for having 4-6 pages that are virtually identical, with the only difference being the names of the cities on each page and in the title bar?

It isn't my intention to spam the search engines... only to further optimize the site for more SE exposure and in the process, provide customers looking for the service in their city with an intro page relevant to their city.

Thoughts, suggestions?

It almost took you longer to write this post than it would to write two unique paragraphs about these 4 to 6 cities. Do that and your worries will be over.

Also if you are just swapping city names you are missing one of the most powerful elements of SEO. If you page for each city also includes a few landmark locations related to your travel service or the city in general then you will show up in the search engine for many other terms which are probably less competetive.