Is it time to scrap Northwest Indiana?

I’m not talking about wiping Lake, Porter and LaPorte counties off the map.  Instead, I’m thinking about the search term “Northwest Indiana” as it is used on websites and blogs throughout our area.

Some thoughts why scraping “Northwest Indiana” might be appropriate.

Does anyone in our area — besides bloggers — use the term Northwest Indiana when they talk about the region?

Do people outside of Northwest Indiana ever use the term?

Do big players such as Google know where “Northwest Indiana” is located?  The answer is No — Google doesn’t know where Northwest Indiana is, at least not by the map they have been displaying.

There’s some interesting talk about the subject of what search terms to use when targeting Northwest Indiana readers over at Green Point Homes.

Brad comments on the discussion:

The problem with NWI is we are so fragmented. Decide where your core geographic areas are to build and go for those town names might be a good strategy because “Northwest Indiana” is kind of amorphous. Usually owning the specific niche first: “Portage” is where you want to start then expand out from there.

What do you think?

Is it time to stop using Northwest Indiana and instead focus on branding content as being for Crown Point, Valparaiso, Gary or other places in the area?

Do you use Northwest Indiana when talking about the region?

Have you heard other people say “Northwest Indiana?”

Technorati Tags: Google, Northwest Indiana, regionalism, search terms, SEO

Google does not know where Northwest Indiana is located.

This cannot be good for people who are using the keyword “Northwest Indiana” since Google currently thinks NWI is located in South Central Indiana.

Technorati Tags: Google, Northwest Indiana

I checked my Page Rank the other day after noticing that my toolbar rank was showing zero.  Now, the PR is back to normal — 4/10.

I have been dumping some parked domains that I had been hoarding for a while that were pointing to this site.  I also dropped a dedicated IP address pointing here as well.  Both were at the suggestion of my chief financial officer — my wife — who said we didn’t need to pay for all sorts of domain names and fancy hosting services that aren’t absolutely needed.  When my wife says to do something, it’s best to follow along.  I wonder if that might have caused the ripple in my PR earlier this week?

If not, it might signal something is going on with the rankings.  Of course, it could also just have been an outage someplace in the big G’s server system.

I’d keep an eye out just to see if there is any movement, however.

Technorati Tags: Google

My neighborhood has disappeared from Google Maps.  I’m hoping that it’s just a function of Google having many different servers that sometimes aren’t synchronized with each other.

I did notice that Mapquest was up to date with the right location.

It just shows that it is always good to check multiple sources when an address can’t be located.  Just because something isn’t listed by a mapping service doesn’t necessarily mean that an address doesn’t exist.

Technorati Tags: Google Maps, Mapquest

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