There’s a piece of conventional search engine optimization wisdom that I think needs challenging.
Hands up if you’ve heard this:
“Smart SEO strategy is to start out targeting your long tail keywords first, and as you generate fast traffic from them and grow your site’s authority it becomes easier to take on your more short tail, competitive terms.”
Overall, it has it’s truths, and isn’t bad advice. But lately I’m finding the opposite strategy to also have merit.
That is, trying to target some of your shorter tail keywords first, and it becoming easier to rank for your long tail keywords as you build links to your short tail focused content.
Example:
I’m promoting Firepow software and my short tail keyword is Firepow, and my long tail keywords (a few of them) might be Firepow blogging software, and Firepow blogging software review.
I have been noticing both in analyzing competing sites in some of my niches, and confirmed by testing it on my own sites, that when you start out building links to your site (possibly your home page) with the anchor text “Firepow”, it becomes easier to rank for “Firepow Blogging Software” almost by default.
I’ve seen cases where I’ve got a blog on a domain like: reviewfirepow.com and I want that root domain to rank for Firepow so I go about building my links… and after time my post (eg) reviewfirepow.com/firepow-blogging-software is ranking for Firepow Blogging Software even though I didn’t build a SINGLE link to that post…
Where alternatively I would have spent time building lots of links to that individual post to have it ranking, then moved on to another keyword, by hitting the main keyword hardest and first, ranking for the subsequent keywords requires less, or even NO effort.
I’ve seen competitor sites doing it too. Building NO links to their inner pages but all links to their home page and just ON PAGE optimizing all their post pages well, and by consequence sending so much spider juice to those inner pages that that, in itself, along with sitting on an authoritative domain with alot of links is enough to have those inner pages rank for all their long tail keywords.
If you do this, you do sacrifice a little long tail traffic in the short term, but over the long term, pick up more of it, as well as more short tail traffic because you spent more of your optimization and link building efforts there.
While this is not a call to drop the one method and replace it with the other, it’s definitely something to think about, and maybe test out in your own SEO. If you happen to do so, or have done so already, do let me know!
I hope you found this valuable.
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Andrew,
I find the same thing happening on my personal site. I have been uncommitted about what I want to do with the site and all the inbound links go to my home page. I rank really well for some terms that were used in one article that I had written where the term was part of a comparison.
Andrew :
Thnaks for the info. I have been taught to focus on the longtail keywords. In doing so I never even go back and try to rank for the main keywords.
Your results are interesting and something that I am going to have to try and test myself.
Thanks!
- Rick
Give it a shot Rick – you might be surprised at what you see!
Andrew
Thankyou for that, I’m giving that a go on my next PnP blog to see how much faster it is… Now that my first batch are ranking, I’m wondering… Is there a set of page titles that you feel are the top ten? I got a list of must have pages based on keywords from your co-trainer at NBI Colleen Slater, and I can’t find that email. It’s a bit odd as I never delete her emails… It’d be good if maybe you could ask her to do a guest post, and then give us your top ten.. I think it’d be interesting to hear which, if any are different, and why… anyone else agree?
Hi Andrew,
good point of view, yes i noticed that practice on most of authority sites. if we use seo tools like seo quake, we can see that mostly the number of backlinks that go to the homepage are greater than links go to their inner pages.
by the way can you help me with exact match domain name theory. nowadays ,it’s so difficult to find the best exact match domain name because mostly they are already taken.
what is your suggestion, should i use hyphen (sometimes exact match keywords with hyphen also gone already..oh dear) or last chance is using short word at the end of exact match domain name.
thanks n appreciated your thoughts.