I imagine it is quite safe to say that most of us in the search marketing sphere have heard the quote “content is king” a few thousand times or so. But is it really? Is content really the trump card? Will 1000 words of moderately relevant content get me to page one tomorrow?
The fact of the matter is that yes, “content is king”. In my opinion, 200 words of highly targeted copy will do more for your search marketing efforts than a 1000 words focused too broadly on several different terms. Now for those of you who are hell bent on broad keyword focus and putting all your eggs in the Latent Semantic Indexing basket, this may not be the type of strategic thinking that you want to hear. But for those of in search of optimizing further down the tail, increasing site pages and giving your visitors the exact content they what to read…then read on.
Too often I work on sites with a small amount of copy on site pages. When I begin working with a site with an abundance of site copy I am truly elated, but often I find pages where there is too much copy on site pages. Too much copy on site pages? Yes, that’s right an SEO just said that. The problem here is that the expanse of copy is covering so many keyword topics that it dilutes any one term’s intended keyword focus. Whenever I encounter this problem I go with the old methodology of “divide and conquer”. For example, you have a page which describes in 1000 words the five different industries your company provides services for divided by sub-headings. This is a great opportunity to keep this page as a linking page to five separate pages which each now better focus on “’x’ services for the ‘x’ industry”. Each page’s content is now extremely focused on this topic and will likely better rank for this specific term better than before when it was only a fifth of the page’s keyword focus.
Several site areas can take advantage of this content strategy. An FAQ page with 15 great keyword-rich questions with 15 keyword-rich answers with a moderate amount of copy can easily become 15 new site pages highly targeted for long tail question searches on the web. This strategy rings true for glossary terms on a site. An abundant definition now receives its own page where before it was one of 50 terms on a page, and now, you have 50 highly targeted pages ready to rank for definition searchers. I think by now that you get the picture, “content is king” in SEO, and will be for some time to come. But it doesn’t end at that, the “divide and conquer” method ensures that your content will work for you instead of existing as a nothing more than a bulk of un-focused content.
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