I've been doing a bunch of research and brainstorming lately about creating some local directories for a few city's around where I live. Tonight while I was researching some kw's I came across someone who has been doing this for a while, their website says they started in 2003. It looks like they actually have a decent amount of businesses paying for advertising space/premium listings, the thing is their sites suck. They look like they are from 1995, the one that I would be in competition with only has about 400 bl's(which are mostly links from their other sites, and it doesn't even look like they have any good on page SEO. It looks like the meta tags are the same for evey page, the name of the site, and their url's are domain.com/#chinese instead of something like domain.com/mycitychineserestaurants. I found a pretty cool wp theme that would make a directory site that looks a lot better, and I also want to include a forum and some other things to attract users. Would you guys go forward with this project? Together the city's total about 200k residents, and there is a big business presence throughout all 3. I just don't want to run into "well we already advertise on that other local site" constantly.
