Is this a bad idea?

I have a client who has been advised by a friend to list all the geographical areas they cover (about 20 - 30 of them) at the bottom of their homepage in the hope that searches for these words will drive traffic to their site. I can’t see how this many ‘keywords’ will work on one page but am unsure whether it actually does any harm. Can anyone advise?

I have seen many sites do this, and my personal experience with it has not been very successful.

If linking from the homepage you do get good exposure and typically the homepage will have the highest PR for a site to pass on link juice, but the more links you add the more diluted the link juice becomes to flow to these pages. It can be helpful to deep link to pages from the homepage that may not get a lot of exposure typically.

Long term though it is best to obtain external links to these pages. Also since they are in the footer of the page, Google may easily detect and ignore or filter them out.

I do not see any real downside to testing it.

Sorry, I didn’t explain this very well, it isn’t links that are at the bottom of the website page, just a list of keywords.

If it is just a list of keywords that are not linked then it will most likely not give you any advantage. Keywords at the bottom of the page will look spammy and the search engines will most likely ignore them or just filter them out.

If you want to target different geographical areas, then I would create a unique page for each area with some content about it. It is a lot more work, but it will give you a much better advantage of ranking for those terms long term.

I’ve certainly see it work, especially if the keywords are not all that competitive.

I would agree it could work if the keywords are not that competitive, but this is a method that was used 2-3 years ago and the search engines have gotten much better at detecting keyword stuffing techniques.

Hello, I don’t think that this is a good strategy. cause in your web page you want to add world map and for that you are using java script. but java script hick your web page load time. and crawler is not support java script. so, you have two negative points over there. which can be bad impact on SERP.

Hi spabeauty - no neither maps or javascript has been used for this. Just plain keywords
Hi revium - yes it is keyword stuffing that I was worried about, so from what you say, I am right in saying to the client that they have been badly advised. Also, I don’t think this number of keywords read well for the website visitor. Thanks for the confirmation that I am on the right track.