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SEO Marketing and the Content Dilemma
By Mike Murray | September 29, 2005
We often take on new SEO marketing clients that have two problems - very little content and pages that don’t even contain the strategic keywords the company identifies.
This month, we’ll look at how we handle those challenges.
1. Little Content
Our SEO marketing program allows us to edit content. We have a rather liberal interpretation of what that means. We don’t merely revise copy to weave in keywords. We literally write copy at times. It’s a tall order, too, because some pages have fewer than 100 words when we come on the scene.
We manage to add content depth - and increase the odds of ranking success. The additional text is derived from conversations with clients, facts and details from other industry Web sites and any other material we can get our hands on (sometimes something in print that the company hasn’t posted).
We even make the effort to add text to pages that clients wonder why we touch. For example, a “Contact Us” page may have little more than a welcome sentence and a form. When we’re through, the opening sentence will be much longer. We’ll say something like: “Whether you’re interested in this product or that product, we can help. Contact us today…”
At the bottom of the page, we often include what we call the “Learn More Copy Block.” It’s a short paragraph that essentially serves as a miniature “About Us” section.
Yes, we also optimize product overview and product detail pages. But we’re big on trying multiple pages to see which will rank the best for a given search term. Oddly, the “Contact Us” page may rank higher than a product page. We won’t know until we try.
2. Extra Pages
After we square away primary pages, we begin to develop extra content. We typically don’t start them right away because we want to ensure that the regular pages have some optimization in place. Known by search engines, they’re the most likely to be indexed.
Extra pages can be picked up by search engines (with effective linking), but it sometimes takes a few weeks.
What’s an extra page?
As you might guess, it can be anything about the company. Sometimes, it’s a page of content that the company never got around to developing - everything you need to know about a part for Product 2004-B.
Usually, however, we focus on other content that we can prep for the search engines.
We shouldn’t make a second “About Us” page.
But we’ve been known to create a summary of products or a featured products page. It’s the same information on the Web site just organized different ways (kind of like abstracts). Visitors can get the same by following the navigation, but if the new page is found on search engines the page serves as a handy guide.
Sometimes we don’t limit the page to products. We build some of them around the core navigation. In that case, the page serves as an amplified site map with descriptive text after each link.
Why bother? Again, new content pages often give us the flexibility we need to get keyword in all of the right places on fresh pages with plenty of text.
Questions? Call our SEO marketing firm at 866-RANK-YOU (726-5968), or email us at michael@fathomseo.com.
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