Dividing Up a Site By State

[bcmwp]

I'm working on a site that is going to have a page for every state. Let's just say it's about sweet corn festivals . However, I've noticed that the keywords are very good for the full state name, like Vermont, and also for the two letter code, VT.

For the sake of SEO, how should I best approach these double keywords in my titles, urls and internal links?

1) Sweet Corn Festivals in Vermont | Sweet Corn Festivals in VT
2) Sweet Corn Festivals in Vermont | VT
3) VT Sweet Corn Festivals in Vermont...

etc.?

Any ideas? I'm stuck between wanting to capture all of these keywords and not wanting to get penalized for repeating terms in my titles and urls.

[yukon]

I would go with #2, it's short & very specific.

You should also look at high ranking insurance sites, most include pages for all 50 US States, you might find a trend in what they use to help rank pages per each state.

[glennforum]

After eliminating your choices i would say #2 is your best bet for that. If i may also suggest that you add something to VT, search for an alternative keyword for "Sweet Corn Festival" and connect that with VT.

[warrich]

The second option looks OK to me but you could also use some of the left over characters and add something instead of the VT, use some keyword here. That is a better option, no one will ever look for VT. So it is a waste, a keyword related to your site would stand a much better chance.

[yukon]

Originally Posted by warrich

The second option looks OK to me but you could also use some of the left over characters and add something instead of the VT, use some keyword here. That is a better option, no one will ever look for VT. So it is a waste, a keyword related to your site would stand a much better chance.

I think your wrong about VT being a waste.

This thread is about seo, & Google knows that VT is the same as Vermont.

Do a search on Google for VT & everything is related to Vermont.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=VT

The VT in the page title is for Google, still humans know & understand that it's a state abbreviation.

Alternative spellings (Vermont/VT) help a lot with seo, instead of repeating a single keyword all the time.