Thursday, November 12, 2009

I Want To Add 100 Content Pages. How Should They Be Organized?

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I am sure you have heard: Content Is King!

What exactly does that mean? Most search engines like to highly rank authoritative websites. What is an authoritative website? It is a website that is full of informative information related to the site topic (primary keyword).

The best way to do this is to create supportive content to your main (primary) keyword. Let's suppose your keyword is "golf". Even if you wrote a book worth of information related to golf, you will probably not get to the number one position, unless it is extremely well organized with all supporting keywords in a hierarchical structure. If you address all the supporting keywords, it will result in hundreds of pages. Many large companies track thousands of keywords. How should these pages be organized?

The more organized the content pages, the more likely these pages will be indexed and provide juice to your main keyword. So is there any simple methodology to creating a power structure? Yes, there are several methods. One method would be to create an "outline" of main topics and subtopics. After you have created an outline, you can create folders based on the topics and subtopics. Each of the keywords (content) can be assigned to one of the folders. In order for each content page to be effective, meta tags, eg meta title, must be unique or the value of creating an unique page will be defeated.

Another method is to create folders based on a list of keywords. Lets say, you have 100 keywords. Some keywords maybe one word, two words, three word, etc. Based on the keywords, folders can be created based on each keyword. Another words, folders are created by using the first word in all keywords. Sub-folders, are created by using the first and second word in a keyword phrase, and so on. This creates an ordered folder/file structure, that is not only well organized around keywords, but more importantly can be done automatically. An example folder/file structure for the keyword "chicago ladies golf shoes" would be: www.domain-name.com/chicago/ladies/golf/shoes/chicago-ladies-golf-shoes.html.

Which method is better? From a search engine approach, they both may have equal results, but the second method is straight forward and can be done by anyone. In addition it can be automated which has been done by Web Coast Design.

Why do most companies, resist creating many content pages? Is it because it is hard to write the content pages? I dont believe so. The real problem, is all the little things that must be put in place, eg the Meta titles, Meta keywords, Meta descriptions, menus, cross links, but even more important is the ongoing maintenance. What happens when you want to update, eg add a page , or delete a page? and everything has to be re-published? You want a system that can quickly and automatically update all pages with the correct menus and cross links, like SEO Page Pro.

Many companies use Content Management Systems (CMS) to manage page content, but they do not focus on Keywords and they do not provide any guidance in creating Meta Titles which is the most important of all the Meta tags.

Nick, the SEO guy

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