Those “in the know” about search engines are far too familiar with the phrase “Content is King”. Search Engines tend favor large, dynamic sites to smaller, static ones. This is primarily because larger, dynamic sites are more likely to contain fresh information of value to the search engine’s audience.
Over the years, we have worked with some of the world’s largest online media companies such as Forbes.com and CNET Networks who are widely considered leading sources of information within their respective subject matters. Both entities have achieved “authority” status with the search engines and thus are typically “crawled” deeper and more often than smaller sites with similar information. Not surprisingly, they also find it much easier than the average Joe to rank for more competitive search terms.
If you think about it, it makes perfect sense for Google to want to be there when Forbes breaks a story on say, a trading scandal… or when CNET breaks a story on the first review of the latest, soon to be released tech gadget.
As a basic rule of thumb, you should only optimize an individual web page for 2-3 search terms. Depending on the depth of your site, this may be a limiting factor in your ability to gain valuable market share on the search engines.
As you research keywords for your existing web pages you will undoubtedly come across an extraordinary amount of derivative search terms that you simply don’t have the room to accommodate on your current web pages. Or perhaps you have developed a substantial list of keywords for your paid search initiatives, but again… you lack the pages to implement them into your SEO strategy. You might also want to purchase access to competitive research applications like Spyfu, Keycompete, or Compete.com to see what terms are referring traffic to your competitors websites. Whichever way you find the new keywords, the idea is to create a list of relevant keyword phrases that you do not have room to accommodate on your existing pages.
Once you’ve isolated the new keywords, try to group the terms into logical buckets. From there, use a keyword analysis tool like Wordtracker or Wordbutler to see how many people search for the terms your considering. Once you’ve completed this step, you can then determine which buckets (and related pages) have the most market potential. That’s basically it… your off and writing content and on your way toward bigger, better organic search traffic volumes.
With a little creativity and some elbow grease, there are always opportunities to organize and leverage content to increase search engine traffic. There are unique opportunities to leverage vertical market specific content to exponentially increase organic search engine traffic. This is achieved by creating content around specific categories of information that enable you to target a large number of keywords. So go ahead, get outside the box and think long and hard about the content that your target audience is most interested in. Chances are that the search engines will reward you for your efforts.
