Monday, July 9, 2012

SEO Friendly Images

SEO Friendly Images is a WordPress optimization plugin which automatically updates all images with proper ALT and TITLE attributes. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according the options you set. Additionally this makes the post W3C/xHTML valid as well.

ALT attribute is important part of search engine optimization. It describes your image to search engine and when a user searches for a certain image this is a key determining factor for a match.

TITLE attribute play lesser role but is important for visitors as this text will automatically appear in the tooltip when mouse is over the image.

Linkbaiting or Link Baiting Strategies?

- no title specified

Linkbaiting or Link Baiting Strategies?

BY AARON WALL

Rand mentioned that there are multiple types of linkbait, those that are known as controversial and those which are informational or comprehensive. I view them both as being in the same category though...evoking emotions and thus links. :)

I just updated my ebook again. I added quite a bit of information about designing / creating / formatting / packaging / launching / and marketing link bait. While it will surely change in future versions, here is some tips from the current version, similar to my recent WMW Pubcon talk on viral marketing.

Link Baiting
The idea of link baiting is to create a piece of content which is centered on a set demand from a specific audience. Who do you want to relate to? Why would they care? What would make them likely to spread your idea?

For example, Salary.com sponsored research stating that work at home moms did $134,121 worth of work each year. Because it was packaged as research and a story people would want to spread it spread far and wide.

Some common link baiting techniques

  • •.Talk about a specific community. 

  • •.Give people a way to feel important about themselves, someone they care about, or something they feel should be important. 

  • •.Take recent events and scale them out to others in your community. 

  • •.Be provocative or controversial. 

  • •.Be a contrarian. 

  • •.Be thorough. 

Controlling Your Message

  • •.Launch your story on a main channel such that you can change your messaging or update your offering based on feedback. If they wrong group runs with your story you may not want to stop them. ï 

  • •.If you do not have a main channel which you can launch your idea on try to launch your idea by giving a popular channel such as TechCrunch the exclusive on your story. 

  • •.If possible, build trust and attention in the marketplace well ahead of when you need to leverage it. 

  • •.Consider potential blowback ahead of time. Depending on the importance of your message and brand strategy you may want to make your message easy to misinterpret OR you may want to make your message clear. 

  • •.Create common link points. Do not throw away your link equity. For example, here are a couple ways people throw away link equity they earned: 

    • •.Some book authors do not create an official page about their book on their site, and thus just give away the link equity and top ranking to an online bookstore. 

    • •.Many people use Surveymonkey or some other 3rd party voting service when they create contests and polls. If you can include the voting script on your site you keep that link authority associated with your site even after the poll closes and people no longer talk about it. 

Magnetic Headlines

  • •.Be specific with your headlines. Salary.com stating that work at home moms are worth $134,121 a year is probably going to spread further than if they said $200,000. 

  • •.Write your headlines with the intent of spreading them. Focus more on writing something that evokes emotional responses and spread rather than writing for keywords and SEO. 

  • •.Given that many social news sites have a voting mechanism that does not even require people to read the article to vote, the title may be far more important than the actual content of your link bait. 

  • •.Copy Blogger offers great free headline writing tips. 

Me Me Me: the Selfish Web

  • •.People like to view themselves as being important. 

    • •.Many bloggers search for links to their blogs on Technorati or Google Blog Search multiple times each day (I typically do). 

    • •.Calling out specific people, especially with humor, is an easy way to build linkage data. 

    • •.Digg frequently has homepage stories about Digg or Digg users. 

    • •.People are more likely to believe and spread messages which reinforce their world view. 

  • •.Community involvement is important to help others identify with and feel ownership in your link bait. 

  • •.When Rand Fishken launched his Search Engine Ranking Factors he collected feedback from about a dozen prominent members in the SEO community. Many of those people are active community members who helped spread the news at launch time. 

    • •.Asking people for feedback can help others feel ownership in your idea, and is a way to pitch them on your idea without looking sleazy pitching it. 

Seeding Your Idea

  • •.Ask for feedback from people who may be interested in helping you improve your idea or helping you market it. 

  • •.Leverage friends and contacts via instant message and email. 

  • •.Pitch relevant bloggers and media sources. It is preferable to build rapport prior to pitching. 

  • •.Build accounts on social news sites. 

  • •.Some social news sites allow you to place voting buttons on your site. Do so on your most important ideas. 

  • •.Consider the best times and locations to launch your idea. 

  • •.Have a friend or yourself submit your best ideas to the most authoritative and relevant social news sites. 

    • •.Ensures your story has a title that is easy to vote for. 

    • •.Ensures your story is submitted at an appropriate time. 

    • •.If you do not do it soon after mentioning a story on your own site someone else may submit for you, using a dumb title or dumb post content. 

Launching a Static Site
Even if your site is fairly static in nature you can still create a buzz when you launch it.

  • •.Call in favors from people you helped in the past. 

  • •.ncorporate community ideas into your idea. 

  • •.Spread out your ideas. For example, if you are forming a new partnership you can triple dip on publicity: 

    • •.Interview partners on another channel. 

    • •.Announce the launch. 

    • •.Add linkbait to the site at a later point in time. 

Formatting Link Bait

  • •.Make it easy to identify and connect with. Think about human emotions and tap the sense of empathy. 

  • •.You may want to make your idea look polarized such that it especially appeals to one group and/or especially offends another. If other people are fighting over guessing your intentions you will get quality links. 

  • •.Make your link bait look comprehensive. 

    • •.Perception is more important than reality. 

    • •.Most writing is quite wasteful in nature, because you have to trim off much of what you create. 

    • •.By creating ordered lists of factoids an incomplete story can look well researched, even if it is not. For example, if you make a list of 101 ways to do x people may give a few ideas and some feedback, but nobody is going to sit and list 383 ways to do x. 

  • •.Cite research, further reading, and link out to related resources from within your content. It makes your story look well researched and associates your work with other trusted names or brands in your field. You may even want to cite a few people that you want links from. 

  • •.Dress up your link bait using quality design and / or relevant images from sites like Istockphoto. 

Monetizing Link Bait

  • •.Make your link bait EASY to link at. 

  • •.Don't over-monetize it right out of the gate. Make it look like research which is easy to cite rather than a piece of commercial information. 

  • •.In Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content Clay Shirky stressed the importance of gaining authority to gain scale and distribution if you want to make money online. 

  • •.Link bait rarely makes much money or directly pays for itself from the direct traffic. However, it has amazing indirect value. 

    • •.People who pay attention to the active portions of the web are far more likely to be web publishers than those who do not. 

    • •.Even if people do not link to your link bait idea right away you still gain mindshare and brand recognition amongst a group of people who have significant authority. 

    • •.Many search engines, such as Google, use authority centric relevancy algorithms. Editorial links are seen as votes or signs of trust. 

    • •.In Google, getting a link to any part of your site will help make all pages on your site more authoritative. 

  • •.Two weeks after launching a linkbait my Google traffic and site earnings more than doubled on a site that was getting thousands of visitors and making over $100 a day from AdSense before the viral marketing campaign. 

Bubbling Up

  • •.Social news sites and social bookmarking sites have recently popular lists that many people read. 

  • •.Meme trackers track what stories are quickly spreading through the blogosphere. 

  • •.Exposure on either of these can cause additional exposure and more linkage data. Many bloggers and some mainstream media outlets (like the MSNBC Clicked Blog) use these social news sites to find stories or sources. 

Don't Compete With Yourself
Be careful what you name your link bait ideas. If your link bait is well executed and targets keywords important to other pages on your site the link bait will likely outrank your other pages in the search results.

Our SEO for Firefox page nearly outranks our homepage in Google for SEO.

 

SEO Friendly Page Titles and Header

Tips on Page Titles
Google shows the first 60 to 70 characters in the search results. Make sure your important keywords occur early in the page title for scan-ability. If your title goes beyond 70 characters Google may cut off the title before 69 characters and display ... at the end of your page title.

Rather than making your page title just the keyword and/or starting your page title with the keyword, sometimes it helps to add in a descriptive modifier before your core keyword. This helps ensure your page is less likely to get filtered out of the search results (and thus makes your rankings more stable) while helping you rank for additional terms.

Page titles are used to draw in clicks from search results amongst many anonymous competing offers, thus they present an opportunity to differentiate yourself from the competition and qualify prospects to your offer.

Good titles evoke an emotional response, ask a question, or promise something (that the landing page fulfills).

Since the page title is one of the few elements search engines can show searchers before sending them to your site, they place significant weight on the words in the page title. In addition, some people link to pages using their official page title as the link anchor text.

Overlapping modifiers in a reasonable and readable way allows you improve your relevancy scores for an array of keywords, but they still need to read well. Rather than loading up page titles with a keyword list it is better to write a clear compelling offer that contains your keywords and describes your services.

Qualifying the wrong prospective clients with a bad offer will lead to a low conversion rate, or wasting time servicing non-clients. For example, if you sell something that is high end you wouldn't necessarily want to rank for your keyword with modifiers like cheap and discount, as servicing those people will waste your time.

Page titles should be differentiated from page to page on your site. It is best not to have all your page titles follow the exact same formula across your site. You also should not use the same keyword at or near the start of every page title.

The format, order, and word selection of the words in your page title should be (at least slightly) different than the words in your meta description and on page headers.

If you have a strong brand you may want to place it at the end of your page title. If you have one of the leading trusted Internet brands (Amazon, eBay, etc.) then it might make sense to place your brand at the start of the page title. In most cases the page title should still be more focused on the page copy and searcher's intent than on your brand.

If you blog or are creating linkbait make sure you try to create headlines that draw clicks by using magnetic headline principals.

10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work
So, you’re seeing too many of those “how to” and list headlines, and want to try a few different angles?
Let’s move beyond those common headline formulas you see over and over, and add some new blood to your attention-grabbing arsenal.

1. Who Else Wants [blank]?
Starting a headline with “Who Else Wants…” is a classic social proof strategy that implies an already existing consensus desire. While overused in the Internet marketing arena, it still works like gangbusters for other subject matter.

Who Else Wants a Great WordPress Theme?
Who Else Wants a Higher Paying Job?
Who Else Wants More Fun and Less Stress When on Vacation?

2. The Secret of [blank]
This one is used quite a bit, but that’s because it works. Share insider knowledge and translate it into a benefit for the reader.
The Secret of Successful Podcasting
The Secret of Protecting Your Assets in Litigation
The Secret of Getting Your Home Loan Approved

3. Here is a Method That is Helping [blank] to [blank]
Simply identify your target audience and the benefit you can provide them, and fill in the blanks.
Here is a Method That is Helping Homeowners Save Hundreds on Insurance
Here is a Method That is Helping Children Learn to Read Sooner
Here is a Method That is Helping Bloggers Write Better Post Titles

4. Little Known Ways to [blank]
A more intriguing (and less common) way of accomplishing the same thing as “The Secret of…” headline.
Little Known Ways to Save on Your Heating Bill
Little Known Ways to Hack Google’s Gmail
Little Known Ways to Lose Weight Quickly and Safely

5. Get Rid of [problem] Once and For All
A classic formula that identifies either a painful problem or an unfulfilled desire that the reader wants to remedy.
Get Rid of Your Unproductive Work Habits Once and For All
Get Rid of That Carpet Stain Once and For All
Get Rid of That Lame Mullet Hairdo Once and For All

6. Here’s a Quick Way to [solve a problem]
People love quick and easy when it comes to solving a nagging problem.
Here’s a Quick Way to Get Over a Cold
Here’s a Quick Way to Potty Train Junior
Here’s a Quick Way to Backup Your Hard Drive

7. Now You Can Have [something desirable] [great circumstance]
The is the classic “have your cake and eat it too” headline — and who doesn’t like that?
Now You Can Quit Your Job and Make Even More Money
Now You Can Meet Sexy Singles Online Without Spending a Dime
Now You Can Own a Cool Mac and Still Run Windows

8. [Do something] like [world-class example]
Gatorade milked this one fully with the “Be Like Mike” campaign featuring Michael Jordan in the early 1990s.
Speak Spanish Like a Diplomat
Party Like Paris Hilton
Blog Like an A-Lister

9. Have a [or] Build a [blank] You Can Be Proud Of
Appeal to vanity, dissatisfaction, or shame. Enough said.
Build a Body You Can Be Proud Of
Have a Smile You Can Be Proud Of
Build a Blog Network You Can Be Proud Of

10. What Everybody Ought to Know About [blank]
Big curiosity draw with this type of headline, and it acts almost as a challenge to the reader to go ahead and see if they are missing something.
What Everybody Ought to Know About ASP
What Everybody Ought to Know About Adjustable Rate Mortgages
What Everybody Ought to Know About Writing Great Headlines

Always install WordPress on the root directory

Unless your blog is a secondary part of an existing website you should always install WordPress on the root directory. When I created my first blog I used an automatic WordPress instalation that my web hosting company offered, but the standard installation was done on “www.domain.com/blog”.
I was not sure how this would affect the blog therefore I decided to leave things as they were. A couple of months later when I started studying SEO I realized that this was a bad move. My blog could be accessed either through “www.domain.com” or “www.domain.com/blog”, meaning that the Homepage was duplicated. Secondly Google’s Pagerank was also being divided and some aggregators like Technorati were considering the two addresses as two different blogs.
This is my contribution to the “Blogging Mistakes” project. We already have 21 people participating, if you have not submitted your entry make sure you do so. The deadline is the midnight of Sunday. I am looking forward to reading your blogging mistakes!

Daniel, My blog is about four months old. I have WordPress installed in a blog directory rather than the root directory, but in Dashboard under General Options I have the following: WordPress address: http://www.rayfowler.org/blog Blog address: http://www.rayfowler.org This seems to take care of the problem. When I try entering the site using the /blog address, I get a 404. Is it okay having it set up this way, or am I missing something? Thanks, Ray

Daniel on July 20, 2007 5:09 am Ray, your WordPress files are installed on the subdirectory, but the blog address is set to the root, so you are fine.

Sunday, July 8, 2012

How to Create Cornerstone Content That Google Loves

- no title specified

 

How to Create Cornerstone Content That Google Loves

 

Imagine with me for a second… someone has just arrived at your website, and this person has no ideawhat you’re talking about. And this is an important visitor.
 

Pretend further that this single visitor could make the difference between success and failure for your business. She has no time to waste poking around your site trying to figure out what you’re all about, so she immediately picks up the phone and calls you, demanding an explanation.

What do you tell her?

You’d likely explain by giving her the essential information about how you can help, and why you perfectly meet her needs, right? And I’m betting you’d want to explain it in the most compelling fashion you could, given what’s riding on the deal.

In a nutshell, that’s what Google wants you to do with the content on your site.

When trying to rank well for the one or two topics that your entire site is built around, creatingflagship content is your best bet. Whether it’s a tutorial about search engine optimization basics,blogging for beginners, or copywriting, a frequently asked questions page, or an inspirational mission statement, this content serves a vital function in creating a relevant, compelling, and usefulcornerstone to build a site around.

cornerstone is something that is basic, essential, indispensable, and the chief foundation upon which something is constructed or developed. It’s what people need to know to make use of your website and do business with you.

And when approached in a strategic fashion, this content can rank very well in the search engines. The key is creating compelling content that’s worth linking to, and then finding a way to get the word out.

Here’s a 5-step strategy that I’ve found useful when developing cornerstone content and getting it to rank well.

1. Keywords

Taking into account the above, and what we know about keyword research, choose the most appropriate keyword phrase for your content. In other words, what is the relevant question that searchers are asking that your content and business will answer?

Will answering that question aid a visitor to your site in getting the most out of the experience? Are enough people asking that question to make ambitiously answering it worthwhile?

2. Title Tags and Headline

There’s a lot of debate among SEO practitioners about what works and what doesn’t, but no one disputes the importance of using your targeted keyword phrase in your title tag. Search engines want to offer relevant results, so those results should prominently reflect the words the searcher is using in the title of the page.

But remember also, the title tag is a headline. You want to speak back to the prospective reader in their own chosen words. Plus, you want to wrap those words in a compelling headline structure that promises to answer the exact question the searcher is asking with the query.

And finally, writing the perfect headline makes it more likely that someone will simply use your title to link back to you. To the extent link anchor text is a component of a particular search algorithm, this can only help.

3. Content

Can a 500 word article rank well for a competitive search term all by itself? Absolutely, because a lot of what determines how well a page ranks depends on the overall authority and age of the website it appears on. And perhaps for some topics, a short explanation is all that’s really required from a user-gratification standpoint.

But if you have a newer website trying to rank for a competitive search term, you’ll need links fromother authoritative sources to make it happen. That means your content must be impressive, both in quality and in scope.

Develop an awesome multi-part tutorial. Write an inspirational manifesto. Answer the question so much better and comprehensively than the competition does, and chances are better that your effort becomes worth linking to.

4. Content (SEO) Landing Page

If you’re going to be ambitious in scope with your content, it makes sense to make things easy on the reader from a usability standpoint. A landing page is designed to instantly communicate what’s going on to the visitor as soon as they arrive, and also acts as a table of contents (via links to each part) that increases clarity.

Here are some of the benefits of the landing page approach:

  • •.Retention: Keeping a reader from hitting the back button is crucial to just about every aspect of successful cornerstone content. You can’t score a reader, customer, or link if the benefit of the resource is not quickly communicated. 

  • •.Bookmarks: When presented with a beneficial, if somewhat overwhelming, piece of content, the first impulse is often to bookmark the page for a return visit. When that book marking occurs at a social site like Delicious, it can lead to long-term traffic. And when a whole bunch of those bookmarks happen in a short period of time, you can enjoy a viral effect that leads to more bookmarks and lots of links due to being highlighted on the Delicious popular and home pages. Landing pages help you score the bookmark. 

  • •.Links: Likewise, a visiting blogger or webmaster might be instantly impressed with your work, and link to you based on the benefits and scope communicated by the landing page itself. The quicker you can impress a potential link source, the easier you’re making it for them to follow through. 

  • •.Optimization: Tweaking on-page copy can boost your ranking after attracting those links, so a landing page is a key benefit. It’s a lot easier to optimize a landing page than your 5,000 word opus. 

5. Related Content

You may have noticed that I’ve used the word “website” throughout this post, rather than blog. However, I would never try to undertake this strategy without having a blog involved.

Search engines favor websites that have a lot of relevant, frequently-updated content, and they also like a lot of general link authority. Given the ease-of-publishing blogging provides, it’s smart to utilize blog software from a content-management standpoint. And given that active blogging allows for constant participation in the social media space, it’s a critical way to build general site authority via links, delve into specific and related topics, and to reference your cornerstone content.

You will certainly feature a link to your essential content in the sidebar. And if you’ve done your job correctly when selecting the focus, it will be perfectly natural to continue to cross-reference link to your cornerstone piece from within future posts as well.

Don’t go overboard, but do provide context when discussing advanced topics that require an understanding of the basics. Never assume that everyone is aware of your cornerstone resource or understands the basics. Periodically cross-referencing your cornerstone content allows for continued exposure and links, assuming it still meets the needs of the audience.

In Conclusion

The first goal of cornerstone content is usefulness and relevancy to the website visitor, no matter how they arrive. The second goal is to make that content so compelling and comprehensive that people are willing—no, make that excited—to link to it.

If you focus on these two goals in a strategic manner, the search engine thing has a good chance of working itself out. Since attracting links is so important, we’ll next explore ways to proactively get the word out about your cornerstone content.

This is an excerpt from a free 28-page report called How to Create Content that Ranks Well in Search Engines. To get the whole story, head over to the SEO Copywriting Made Simple page to instantly download the full updated PDF.

 

How to Create Cornerstone Content That Google Loves

 

Imagine with me for a second… someone has just arrived at your website, and this person has no ideawhat you’re talking about. And this is an important visitor.
 

Pretend further that this single visitor could make the difference between success and failure for your business. She has no time to waste poking around your site trying to figure out what you’re all about, so she immediately picks up the phone and calls you, demanding an explanation.

What do you tell her?

You’d likely explain by giving her the essential information about how you can help, and why you perfectly meet her needs, right? And I’m betting you’d want to explain it in the most compelling fashion you could, given what’s riding on the deal.

In a nutshell, that’s what Google wants you to do with the content on your site.

When trying to rank well for the one or two topics that your entire site is built around, creatingflagship content is your best bet. Whether it’s a tutorial about search engine optimization basics,blogging for beginners, or copywriting, a frequently asked questions page, or an inspirational mission statement, this content serves a vital function in creating a relevant, compelling, and usefulcornerstone to build a site around.

cornerstone is something that is basic, essential, indispensable, and the chief foundation upon which something is constructed or developed. It’s what people need to know to make use of your website and do business with you.

And when approached in a strategic fashion, this content can rank very well in the search engines. The key is creating compelling content that’s worth linking to, and then finding a way to get the word out.

Here’s a 5-step strategy that I’ve found useful when developing cornerstone content and getting it to rank well.

1. Keywords

Taking into account the above, and what we know about keyword research, choose the most appropriate keyword phrase for your content. In other words, what is the relevant question that searchers are asking that your content and business will answer?

Will answering that question aid a visitor to your site in getting the most out of the experience? Are enough people asking that question to make ambitiously answering it worthwhile?

2. Title Tags and Headline

There’s a lot of debate among SEO practitioners about what works and what doesn’t, but no one disputes the importance of using your targeted keyword phrase in your title tag. Search engines want to offer relevant results, so those results should prominently reflect the words the searcher is using in the title of the page.

But remember also, the title tag is a headline. You want to speak back to the prospective reader in their own chosen words. Plus, you want to wrap those words in a compelling headline structure that promises to answer the exact question the searcher is asking with the query.

And finally, writing the perfect headline makes it more likely that someone will simply use your title to link back to you. To the extent link anchor text is a component of a particular search algorithm, this can only help.

3. Content

Can a 500 word article rank well for a competitive search term all by itself? Absolutely, because a lot of what determines how well a page ranks depends on the overall authority and age of the website it appears on. And perhaps for some topics, a short explanation is all that’s really required from a user-gratification standpoint.

But if you have a newer website trying to rank for a competitive search term, you’ll need links fromother authoritative sources to make it happen. That means your content must be impressive, both in quality and in scope.

Develop an awesome multi-part tutorial. Write an inspirational manifesto. Answer the question so much better and comprehensively than the competition does, and chances are better that your effort becomes worth linking to.

4. Content (SEO) Landing Page

If you’re going to be ambitious in scope with your content, it makes sense to make things easy on the reader from a usability standpoint. A landing page is designed to instantly communicate what’s going on to the visitor as soon as they arrive, and also acts as a table of contents (via links to each part) that increases clarity.

Here are some of the benefits of the landing page approach:

  • •.Retention: Keeping a reader from hitting the back button is crucial to just about every aspect of successful cornerstone content. You can’t score a reader, customer, or link if the benefit of the resource is not quickly communicated. 

  • •.Bookmarks: When presented with a beneficial, if somewhat overwhelming, piece of content, the first impulse is often to bookmark the page for a return visit. When that book marking occurs at a social site like Delicious, it can lead to long-term traffic. And when a whole bunch of those bookmarks happen in a short period of time, you can enjoy a viral effect that leads to more bookmarks and lots of links due to being highlighted on the Delicious popular and home pages. Landing pages help you score the bookmark. 

  • •.Links: Likewise, a visiting blogger or webmaster might be instantly impressed with your work, and link to you based on the benefits and scope communicated by the landing page itself. The quicker you can impress a potential link source, the easier you’re making it for them to follow through. 

  • •.Optimization: Tweaking on-page copy can boost your ranking after attracting those links, so a landing page is a key benefit. It’s a lot easier to optimize a landing page than your 5,000 word opus. 

5. Related Content

You may have noticed that I’ve used the word “website” throughout this post, rather than blog. However, I would never try to undertake this strategy without having a blog involved.

Search engines favor websites that have a lot of relevant, frequently-updated content, and they also like a lot of general link authority. Given the ease-of-publishing blogging provides, it’s smart to utilize blog software from a content-management standpoint. And given that active blogging allows for constant participation in the social media space, it’s a critical way to build general site authority via links, delve into specific and related topics, and to reference your cornerstone content.

You will certainly feature a link to your essential content in the sidebar. And if you’ve done your job correctly when selecting the focus, it will be perfectly natural to continue to cross-reference link to your cornerstone piece from within future posts as well.

Don’t go overboard, but do provide context when discussing advanced topics that require an understanding of the basics. Never assume that everyone is aware of your cornerstone resource or understands the basics. Periodically cross-referencing your cornerstone content allows for continued exposure and links, assuming it still meets the needs of the audience.

In Conclusion

The first goal of cornerstone content is usefulness and relevancy to the website visitor, no matter how they arrive. The second goal is to make that content so compelling and comprehensive that people are willing—no, make that excited—to link to it.

If you focus on these two goals in a strategic manner, the search engine thing has a good chance of working itself out. Since attracting links is so important, we’ll next explore ways to proactively get the word out about your cornerstone content.

This is an excerpt from a free 28-page report called How to Create Content that Ranks Well in Search Engines. To get the whole story, head over to the SEO Copywriting Made Simple page to instantly download the full updated PDF.

Using Cornerstone Content to make your Site Rank

- no title specified

You are here: Home » SEO » Using Cornerstone Content to make your Site Rank

Using Cornerstone Content to make your Site Rank

by Joost de Valk on 8 December, 2011 at 15:08 56 comments

Cornerstone Content
The most common question we answer in our website reviews is "how do I make my site rank for keyword X?". What most people don't realize is that they're asking the wrong question. You see, sites don't rank: pages rank. If you want to rank for a keyword, you'll need to determine which page is going to be the page ranking for that keyword.
 

Adding that keyword to the title of every page is not going to help. Nor is writing 200 articles about it without one central article to link all those articles to. You need one single page that is the center of the content about that topic. One "hub" page, if you will.

That page will need to be 100% awesome in all ways. Brian Clark of Copyblogger calls this type of content "cornerstone content" and has written an awesome article about it (a few years ago, already). In fact, go and read Brian's article, he explains that way better than I can, I'll wait... ... ... You're back? Ok, read on:

Position that new Cornerstone Content within your site

That article said a lot, right? It told you about keyword research, title tags and headlines, content and why your content needs to be awesome and more. Now let's talk about where, within your site, that content is going to live. In my opinion, really important content deserves a page within your site's structure, not a news item / post. It should be easily navigated to within a few clicks.

So, you go ahead and create that page within your site. Take some time for it, this is going to be the content that's going to make you rank, but not just that, it's going to be the content that is ranking. Which means real people will read it too and you need to convert those people. So think about search engines all you want, but think even more about the visitor that will end up on that page and give him / her something worth while.

Creating Internal Links

Now, once you have that cornerstone page, it's time for the next step: creating internal links for your article. You're going to do this by figuring out which pages Google already thinks are relevant for your targeted keyword / key phrase. The easiest way to figure out which pages Google thinks are relevant for that keyword is doing a "site:" search in Google. So if I were to try and find the most important page for "website review" within yoast.com, I'd search for:

site:yoast.com website review

You will probably find more than a few pages within your site. Go into each of those pages and add a link to your new cornerstone content. If possible, use the keyword you're targeting as the anchor text for that link, but most importantly: link from within the content. Don't just add some site wide sidebar / footer links. The reason for this is simple: links from within content are way more valuable than links from sidebars.

Afterwards, when you're writing more content for your site, when you touch on a topic related to your cornerstone content, don't forget to link to it! Now, let's go on to the last and final step:

Promote your Cornerstone Content

If you've created it well, your cornerstone content is something to be proud of, something that others will easily share and thus also something that will attract links. Don't be afraid to reach out to other people who have written about related topics: show them what you created and that it might be worth while for their visitors to see that. You might even want to offer them to write a guest post about the topic, linking back to your article.

Stock photo credit: Computer Generated Concept Of Cornerstone from Shutterstock.

Tags: Keyword ResearchLink Building
Category: 
SEO
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