England Travel Guide TravMonkey
As I’ve touched upon in previous articles, creating quality content that your users want to consume is extremely important but to create a useful resource is really where the real power is.
So here are 2 website tips that will boost your search traffic in the long term if you implement them correctly.
What do I mean by “resource”? Well a resource is something that is extremely useful or compelling that I would reference (link to or share on social media) or bookmark. I class our own Top 100 Travel Sites in Google as a resource as it is useful and people reference it.
It’s important to create something that really adds value for your users so that they would want to reference it. Take The Man in Seat Sixty-One for example, his website as a whole is an extremely useful resource that adds value and is referenced around the internet by many people, because it really adds real value with it’s extensive amount of useful train journey information.
You could for example provide a collection of quality articles around a particular topic rather than having them scattered around your website.
You could create “London Landmarks” where you place links to all your reviews of London Landmarks such as “Big Ben”, “The London Eye”, “The Houses of Parliament”, “Tower Bridge”, “Oxo Tower” etc. Not only would this make the “London Landmarks” page a useful page for your users and one they are likely to share or link to but it’ll also improve it’s focus in terms of SEO.
You don’t have to produce a resource on the scale of The Man in Seat Sixty-One, but you can produce a collection of quality articles with valuable information around a particular niche. Having a collection of focused articles can prove much more useful than a few articles scattered across your website here and there. If your resource truly adds value then people will reference it and it will begin to rank well within search engines as a result.
If you have the ability to create useful statistics or data that people are interested in you may well be able to produce a section that users find invaluable. If you are adding value and providing a useful service, users will share, link and bookmark it. In the long term this content will rank well within search engines because of the numerous references around the internet and particularly within your niche.
SEOmoz.org have provided an updated version of their tactics to increase blog traffic, including - #19 – Aggregate the Best of Your Niche. This is a great example of creating a simple data resources that users will come back to time and time again.
If you have created a useful and valuable resource for your users you might want to think about siloing these sections in order to strongly associate the content with the topic in question.
I often bore bloggers at meet ups with talk of siloing content, but what does it mean? There are many talented travel bloggers out there that write some great articles but if these articles not available in the right places on the website they maybe missing out on driving search traffic.
If you have already created a resource you can focus your on-page SEO optimisation by siloing these pages. This involves ensuring that all links to articles or pages from this page are focused and related to the topic of the page in question.
For example if you had a page about “Argentina” any contextual links from this page would relate to that term, for example “Buenos Aires” or “Patagonia”. On the next level down, say on the “Buenos Aires” page you’d apply the same, you may have links to other related pages on your site such as “dance the tango”, “steak”, “Recoleta” etc.Again, those pages would do the same.
This technique is not only useful in terms of usability but helps to focus a page’s theme specifically around a certain topic. It’s much easier for search engines to relate the terms and pages being linked, to identify the theme of the page. If you were to link to much less related content it would dilute the overall focus of the pages.
By siloing your pages it gives them a strong association and can also help your users find related content that they maybe looking for.
For more information on siloing content you can check out seo design solutions blog that has some useful structural SEO articles.
TRAVMONKEY ARTICLE WITH ENGLAND TRAVEL GUIDE
With our new design on TravMonkey.com we focused much more on destinations and relating them to articles. So whenever possible you’ll see a travel guide with the associated country next to a destination specific article. This was just one aspect of improving our user experience and we are continuing to implement improvements going forward. Although we haven’t completely siloed these pages we have seen some great results search engine wise as our articles are associated with destinations more than ever.
Search Engine Optimisation has become much more user focused as search engines want to rank quality content and great websites. Building useful resources that add value, producing quality content and paying attention to usability and the user experience will give your site the best chance to rank well within search.
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Thank you for providing such helpful information.
I am looking forward for more similar content.