Diary of an Online Marketer

A popular saying in the internet marketing world these days is “content is king”. The expression refers to the importance of creating content for your website, and emphasizes that providing interesting and engaging material for the end user can give a website the edge over its competition. But lets face it, not every company is equipped to produce interesting content on their website.  For some companies the problem might be a lack of man power and for others it might be having nothing interesting to write about.

This makes a lot of people cringe when an SEO company tells them they need to produce more keyword-rich content pages in order to rank higher in the search engines. They might worry that too much content is going to clutter the website, confuse the user, or that the low production value of their landing pages might dilute the site’s quality a whole.

The best way to address these problems is taking the Ski-Lift approach to landing pages. The basic idea is that the landing pages will function like ski-lifts; They take users on one-way trips to points on your website,  after which the users will navigate down through your content mountain, never seeing the other ski-lifts that are off to the side.

Most websites implement this by adding links to landing pages on a discreet footer at the very bottom of their page so that people will not notice them, but the search engines will. The landing pages are designed to seamlessly move traffic forward into the site, functioning as a type of entrance page for each keyword they are optimized for. The major advantage is that this leaves the rest of the site’s structure and flow virtually unaltered, while you add as much content as you want.

There are 3 things to keep in mind when using this technique:

• Landing Pages Must Be Action Oriented - Landing pages built as portals must encourage the user to move forward into the site rather than stay on the landing page reading the content (which in all likelyhood is keyword dense and possibly very boring.)
• Do Not Attempt to Make Links to Landing Pages 100% Invisible - Most search engines are smart enough to figure out if your background is green, and your links are green, that you are trying to hide something from your visitors. Google regularly penalizes sites that use these kind of deceptive practices, and by this point they know just about every trick in the book that SEO firms use to try and accomplish this. Usually just putting links in a footer is enough to prevent 99.9% of people from noticing them anyway.
• Create New Pages from Scratch - Copy & Pasted content will get flagged for duplication. Even if you replace an entire page with synonyms and reorder the paragraphs you would not fool Google into thinking that it was a new page. The extra time it takes to create a whole new page is worth it, because once you’re flagged by a search engine it’s nearly impossible to recover.

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