There are two major ways to structure your content. One is at the domain level and the other is at the post level. This article will go over structuring your content at the domain level. What I mean by this is the strategy you take well before any actual writing.
Eventually you will have a spoke and wheel or hub pages to your site. This will dramatically help your SEO as well as increase the time your visitors spend on your site. Ever wonder why the best sites have suggestions at the bottom of their posts? Well, those suggestions are other items in the hub. If you read one article from a company, chances are you are willing to read another. Remember that reputation is a huge part of marketing these days. The more quality you provide potential clients, the more likely they will purchase from you. And if you structure your content correctly, you can provide a lot of those “reputation points” very quickly.
Thankfully when you structure your content correctly user experience and SEO will go hand in hand. You see, your hub pages are synonymous with your categories. This will allow you to easily leverage your posts together for the sake of SEO. Take some time to brainstorm what your potential visitors will want to read. A good number to start with is 3-5 hubs. Feel free to be general – think things like social media, computers, small business, etc. At this stage of the game general is okay because everything will funnel down from here.
Next, look at your categories and start researching keywords. You can use countless free tools like Google’s Adwords Keyword tool. I would also suggest checking out the buzz on Google or Twitter. Don’t worry about competition quite yet. This is not the time for unicorns. Just make a list of 5-10 concepts or keyword phrases below each category/hub page.
If you have an established site, you can simply check out the top content via your Google analytics. When you are just starting out you don’t have anything to look back on so you have to start with basic keyterms. Once you have more traffic, you can modify your keyword phrases by opportunity.
You Might Also Be Interested In:
5 Best Practices for Using Social Media
8 Must Have Social Media Tools
Another key difference between those with established traffic and those just starting out is how the hub is created. When you first start out you simply guess what will have the most affect and add supporting pieces. If you are an established site you see what content is already garnering the most attention and then you attach other items.
Established sites often look back and see that some of their top content isn’t relevant at all. For example, a handyman’s website might have a post about working outdoors in the summertime. Through Google analytics that site owner realizes that the terms going to that post are things like “summertime fun.” Sure, that post might be 2k hits a month, but the people never stay more than a few seconds once they realize it is a handyman blog. Those 2k bounces affect the entire site – by cutting the fat they can increase in ranking for more relevant terms.
Keep that story in the back of your mind as you create your content strategy. You need to have laser like focus when writing a company blog, otherwise you will have tons of random visitors that aren’t of much use.
Okay so we have our 3-5 hubs with keyword ideas. Now is the time to start thinking about titles and concepts. You don’t want to attract a bunch of worthless traffic and you want to speak directly to your audience. I highly suggest making a title list or even a short 3-5 point outline for each piece. This gives you a great view of what your content will look like a few months down the road.
From there elect the piece that will act as your hub. If you are a visual person go ahead and draw it out. If you aren’t, just like the titles for each hub and bold the hub piece.
These hub pages will hopefully focus on the same keyterms your main domain wants to shoot for. This is the path to ranking for many different but relative key terms. This is a super way to garner a ton of SEO juice.
Once you have your content structure in place, it is time to optimize on a post level. That is a completely different article.
Article written and contributed by Amie Marse. Amie is the Founder of ContentEqualsMoney.com She is our contributing author on the subject of Content Writing & SEO and can be contacted via info@contentequalsmoney.com
From: http://ping.fm/dA4wy
No comments:
Post a Comment