For years now the hype behind content “being king” has always seemed a little exaggerated to me. Sure content is important but the power of links has always seemed to outweigh ranking performance every time. Content should always be the foundation to a good website with the users experience in mind, following this methodology usually produces good results, but never amazing ones, especially in competitive industries. There is a flip side however; established websites that do perform well but are looking for extras long tailed traffic and ranking boosts can see great results from the simplest content strategies. So what is a content strategy? Well it’s kind of in the title, create good relevant content based on reliable keyword research and you’ll see vast amounts of new traffic and improved performances in your existing targeted keywords. A simple way to do this always lies in your keyword research, you have to find opportunities in keywords that are not directly related to your industry but are reasonably related. For example, if you own a websites that sells cars you look at what areas can provide your user with added value. So perhaps you would research the keyword “tyres”, “makes of tyres”, “most popular tyres” and so on. The content alone has to obviously be unique and provide reasonable value to your website and user/customer so be careful how you acquire it. Cheap content writers usually recycle a lot of old news and articles so unfortunately you get what you pay for – $30 for 300 words is a reasonable price to expect to pay. For those of you who aren’t sure how you can check to see if the content you pay for is unique, just visit copyscape, enter the URL where the content is held and it will return all locations across the web where the content has been used before, if any. The important part of a content strategy is the housing and management of the content. Simply putting a page of content 2 or 3 levels down in your site architecture in an “articles” folder will not work. Wordpress is a great way of creating new and regular updates to a site but on this occasion i’m going to use a standard HTML folder. Here are some simple rules to abide by;

1. House the content in an appropriate folder i.e. mycars.com/tyre-information/ – include keywords in your folder name that accurately represent what’s included inside
2. Make sure the pages are accessible from your HTML sitemap, this is important to help the pages get indexed quicker
3. List the files in your XML version of the sitemap
4. Make the content area accessible from your main navigation too, this will add the extra layer of visibility to your content area and show the search engines it’s valuable enough to warrant a link from your main menu.

Now the content itself will help your website’s performance for a number of keywords depending on the number of pages you add per strategy. However if there are particular pages on your site you’d prefer to rank better than others then make sure you use this next tip. Link to your targeted internal page in each new section of content. So highlight a relevant keyword in each page and create your link in the body of the text, this will directly pass most of the value and page rank to the targeted internal URL, boosting rankings for your already existing page. The diagram below shows how the value is passed between your new and existing pages

As mentioned this is a very simple strategy that does work with established websites to get new long tailed traffic and to help increase current web rankings.