Plan for Adding Content

The search engines love quality content. It makes their users happy and keeps them coming back. This means that if you want searchers coming back to your site you will need to build content (see Website Content Development for more details on why content is important for SEO).

Before you run off and start cranking out as many articles as you can for your site you need to form a plan. You want to build the right content. The kind of content that will get you the most visitors, the highest rate of conversion, and earn you the most money in the least amount of time. How do you do that?

Keyword Research

After you select what niche you are going to build your site around it's time to do keyword research. Our keyword research strategy guide will help you choosing your keywords that you want to target.

Do Your Homework

The goal is to get to 100 pages of quality content on your site as quickly as you can. This will form a solid base for your site and allow you to start seeing some traffic from the search engines. Do not include your about, contact, archives, or other boilerplate pages in the count. What you want is 100 pages targeted towards specific keywords in your niche. You won't necessarily try to get ranked for all of these keywords right away, instead you will limit your focus to ten or less.

Your main keywords you will most likely focus on the root of the site and specific category pages. What you should do is then take a specific category and continue to drill  it down more specifically. A generic example would be a men's clothing site. One of your categories might be shoes. Drilling down shoes you might come up with black shoes, brown shoes, dress shoes, and running shoes. Then there are Nike running shoes, Asics running shoes, and other brands. There might be several different kinds of red Nike running shoes or white Nike running shoes. You see how I'm drilling these keywords down?

Content

Once you have the specific sub-category topics for that one category you are focusing on it's time to write content. You want these pages to be 200-500 words and to be of high quality. Make sure you spell check and use proper grammar. These are going to be landing pages for specific searches and will likely be giving the first impression a visitor has of your site, so make it a good one.

On-Page SEO

For each page of content you write you will be focusing on a specific keyword. Use that keyword once in the title, once in your heading, in the URL, at least once in the body of the article, and once in the meta description. Don't stuff your keyword into the content, let it flow naturally. Keyword density does not help you in any positive way. Do not be afraid to link to other quality pages covering that keyword. Google says they look at outgoing links as part of their algorithm and rewards webmasters who link to quality content. Sure you will be giving link juice to other sites, but helping visitors find what they are looking for will lead to more bookmarks, discussion, and links to your site.

Internal Links

You want to make sure that you are linking your content together internally so that the search engines get all of your pages in the index and you spread your PageRank around. Your top-level keyword pages should have links down to more specific keywords. Using our example above, running shoes should link down to the different brands of running shoes. You also want to link between pages within the same category and link back up vertically to the category the content is a part of. Each page of your site should be linked to by at least two other pages and shouldn't be more than three clicks away from the homepage. Any deeper than that and it could easily fall out of the index.

Additional Ideas for Content

Once you have drilled down into a specific category, move on to another one within your niche. Keep doing that until you have filled your site out, then move on to the ideas below.

At this point you should have had some visitors from the search engines, so take a look at how they are finding your site. If they are using search terms that you did not think of and do not have a landing page for, you have a new article idea.

Go to Yahoo Answers and enter your keyword in the search box. Are potential visitors asking questions about your topic? If so, you have a fresh idea for a piece of content.

Go to Google and search for "(your keyword) forums". Look around in the forums to see what those members are talking about. If they are asking questions, provide the answer with a page on your site.

Short Term Content

Once you run out of evergreen content ideas you might want to start looking at short-term content. The key is to make sure every article you write gets indexed quickly. If it doesn't, by the time a search engine indexes you the article may no longer be relevant.

Start out trying for seasonal content. If there is an event in your niche that is approaching in a few months, get your content out as early as possible. If you are the first one you will not only get the early traffic, but possibly some extra links. It's kind of like the hottest girl in high school. Some guy would always try asking her to go to prom before anyone else even started thinking about it because she couldn't use the excuse that she was already going with somebody else.

Key Points:

1. Do keyword research - find your main keywords & categories.
2. Pick a category & drill down.
3. Write evergreen content for specific sections of the one category you are focusing on.
4. Once you finish one category move to the next.
5. Find questions your customers are asking.
6. Once indexed, start posting short-term content to boost traffic.

Related Posts:

• Website Content Development
• Evergreen Content
• Short Term Content
• Creating Content with Questions
• What is Link Bait