3 replies to this topic

[carlton]

Hi All,
New here

I am in-house for an eco-travel company. I've contracted with a custom content company to create about 150 new articles over the next few months. The site is in Drupal and the articles will be published to the blog (not external). So I am trying to figure out the best way to use this new content to build rank for the product pages without cannibalizing the product pages.

kenya-tanzania
galapagos-islands
amazon-river-cruises

Since the articles are going to focus on our top 5 most broad, high-volume keyword terms, I planned on building landing pages for each topic, and then link from the landing page to the individual posts, and from the posts linking to the product pages, as well as some deep linking.

My question is, how similar or dissimilar should the URLs and on-page SEO on the landing pages be from the product pages? For instance, if I'm targeting "amazon river cruises" and "galapagos islands cruises" on the product pages, should I consciously seek to use variations for the landing pages, such as "amazon river tours" and "galapagos islands tours"?

Any help appreciated. I look forward to your input.

Thanks

[Jill]

I'm not sure I really understand the purpose of your strategy.

Articles typically will bring in long tail traffic, with your product pages bringing in the more searched upon keyword traffic.

It won't really do you much good to focus your articles on the same keywords as your product pages, nor do I see a reason why you'd want to.

It's also not clear why you think you need 150 articles. That's a lot of content. Is there really enough information about your topic that hasn't been already said by others, to support so many articles?

[carlton]

Jill,
Thanks for your reply.

In the travel vertical, IMO, there's myriad content possibities, especially when you fact in recent events such as earthquakes and civil unrest.

You nailed it - we'll be using the articles to try and capture more long-tail search terms, but want to use some internal linkbuilding to push to our Commerce/Product pages

So the articles really are not focused on the keywords, more like focused on the destinations or travel news surrounding those destinations.

Here is an example of an implementation from this company, Brafton News:

[removed]

Article page.
[removed]

They're obviously targeting "india" and linking to the Commerce page

But I'm skeptical of this strategy. Isn't there a danger of the Content Landing Page outranking the Commerce page? This looks like a sloppy implementation to me.

In your opinion, what would be a better implementation of this strategy?

[Jill]

You nailed it - we'll be using the articles to try and capture more long-tail search terms, but want to use some internal linkbuilding to push to our Commerce/Product pages

Internal link building doesn't really have the oomph it used to have.

If you feel that people in your target audience will be interested in the articles...i.e., if they were on your site anyway, would they browse the articles section? If so, then go ahead and create them and cross link them back to your trips. (Or advertise your trips on them.)

But if you're creating the multitude of articles just because you think it's good for SEO, I'd definitely rethink things. Content for contents sake is so 2010