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Sunday, May 25, 2008

Support Those Landing Pages

We always hear SEO's talking about getting a page to rank. The topics are always the same - What keywords are associated with the page; where those keywords are on the page; how the various tags are constructed; how many links the site and page have. But one thing is so consistently overlooked..

What pages support the one you're trying to rank for?

Even a well constructed, movie star of a page, with a few good links to it is not likely to rank well if it does not have a great supporting cast. Each page that is the focus of an SEO effort should have a minimum of 4 pages of supporting content linked from it. More is better.

For example, if you have a site about Dalwhinnie Scotch (I just happen to be enjoying a knuckler full of the 15 year-old goodness as I write this) you'll need several additional pages of content linked by contextual text links on the Dalwhinnie Scotch page. The links could be topics/anchor text like:

distillation techniques
age of scotch
history of scotch
best scotch whiskey
what is single malt

If the Nav bar page is "Dalwhinnie Scotch" and that is the keyword that you're trying to rank for, you'll have much better luck if you have several (the more the better) supporting content pages.

The supporting pages do a couple of things. First, they establish subject matter expertise of he site author to both search bots and to users. Second, they help focus PageRank on the Nav bar page. Both of these move us closer to our goal.

When you create a set of supporting pages, be sure not to cross link them laterally into other categories on your site. This will create navigation issues for users and may dilute precious PR, when it should remain as potent as possible for the content page you're focused on.

Load up each SEO target page with supporting pages of great content. Over time, this strategy will pay off...big.

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