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How to SEO a site with thousands of specific pages

by nequity
15 replies
  • SEO
    • |
Hi all, I am in a little bit of quandary about how best to SEO a site of mine.

The site is getting already almost all of its traffic off of google, and I am concerned it will drop so want to maintain it.

Now, the thing is, it has loads of pages for specific products. People search for these specific products names and thats basically how they find the site.

Now I am not sure how to SEO the site, because i cant exactly create backlinks to all these thousands of pages. The thousands of pages all get maybe 1 or so visitors a day, but it all adds up to quite a lot of traffic when combined.

I know I can optimize all the on page seo for meta titles etc etcwhich I pretty much have done, but I am at a loss at what else to do to up the rankings?

Ideas/thoughts/anything would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks
#pages #seo #site #specific #thousands
  • Profile picture of the author yukon
    Banned
    One word, silo.

    You don't always need to build external links to every single page on your site. You can group relevant internal pages (silo) to help support each other. This helps get more bang for your buck when building external links.

    Since I don't know your niche/product I'll use camping tent as a niche/keyword.

    Example page titles/keywords:
    • Camping Tents
      • Family Camping Tents
      • Four Season Tents for Winter Camping
      • Backpacking Tents
      • Truck Tents
      • The Best Camping Tent of 2014
      • etc...

    Each one of those camping tent supporting pages has keyword anchor-text links pointing back to the main page (Camping Tents) for that group of keywords.

    Point your best external backlinks at the main page for each keyword.

    Track all the supporting page keywords to see which ones are getting a trickle of SERP traffic. Build additional backlinks to those supporting pages to move them up the SERPs (example longtail keywords). Repeat as needed.

    This way your not overwhelmed with thousands of pages. Break the situation down into smaller jobs.
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  • Profile picture of the author SEO-Dave
    A backlink to any webpage will help the entire site, you don't need to build backlinks to every single webpage.

    All links to home page works (though not natural), all links to one internal webpage works (though again not natural).

    Just build links to whatever webpages you can and use internal links to spread the SEO love. As long as every webpage has a link in and a link out to another internal page the SEO benefit will flow through the site.

    For best results try to target incoming links to important webpages, home page, most important products...

    David
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    Freelance SEO Consultant
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  • Profile picture of the author nequity
    Thanks for this guys. I really appreciate the feedback. Im quite new to SEO so have a lot of questions.

    I have one other questions I was hoping maybe you could answer (it may not be answerable even).

    If i have a page that has the whole on-page SEO going on for a long tail keyword and covers most of the bases if not all, but has no backlinks going on, I am wondering, will this beat out other top 10 pages that do not cover the on-page seo bases but have other off page things like lots of backlinks etc, but like I said, not the on page important stuff?

    Thanks
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    • Profile picture of the author SEO-Dave
      Originally Posted by nequity View Post

      Thanks for this guys. I really appreciate the feedback. Im quite new to SEO so have a lot of questions.

      I have one other questions I was hoping maybe you could answer (it may not be answerable even).

      If i have a page that has the whole on-page SEO going on for a long tail keyword and covers most of the bases if not all, but has no backlinks going on, I am wondering, will this beat out other top 10 pages that do not cover the on-page seo bases but have other off page things like lots of backlinks etc, but like I said, not the on page important stuff?

      Thanks
      It depends.

      Though on-page SEO is very important, it's nothing without off-site SEO (backlinks).

      As I said earlier you don't need incoming links from other domains directly to a specific product page or one targeting a long tail SERP, but the domain as a whole does need backlinks.

      In simple terms as you add backlinks and they age, Google trusts your entire site more and more, it's what many call authority. Look at a site like Amazon or Wikipedia they have countless millions of aged backlinks, Google trusts whatever is added to those domains is probably good quality content worth ranking. They can add new content with only a small number of internal backlinks and rank high for even competitive SERPs.

      Takes years to build that level of trust/authority, longer your site is live and new links are added and you don't recieve any penalties for doing things Google disapproves of, more authority your domain accrues and easier it is for any content to rank high.

      This is when on-page SEO comes into it's own, if you have a site that's trusted by Google AND you are awesome at on-page SEO, long tail SERPs can be as simple as adding a new page targeting the long tail SERP, depending on competitiveness you could be number one in Google next day.

      David
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      Freelance SEO Consultant
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  • Profile picture of the author dewalds86
    This is good to know. So if you just build back links to the main page for example it will help the whole web site.
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    • Profile picture of the author SEO-Dave
      Originally Posted by dewalds86 View Post

      This is good to know. So if you just build back links to the main page for example it will help the whole web site.
      Yes, but it's better to mix things up.

      Think what looks natural, real people won't all link to your home page with perfect keyword rich anchor text. So if you target a SERP like Mortgage Calculator and 99% of your links are to the home page with anchor text Mortgage Calculator, pretty obvious you've been building links and it might be unnatural links (buying them).

      Google will almost certainly look for this automatically.

      If 50% of your links go to home with dozens of different anchor text variations including the main phrase, plus you've built links to internal pages also with varied anchor text, how could an algorythm automatically know they aren't all natural?

      When building links vary which pages you link to. Vary the anchor text.

      When I first got into SEO over 10 years ago when you wanted a SERP like Mortgage Calculator you would add all links to the page targeting that SERP and use the exact same anchor text for all links, Google was too dumb to do anything about it, it worked really well. Over 10 years of very smart people working at Google and they've taken this into account, have to be careful now.

      David
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      Freelance SEO Consultant
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      • Profile picture of the author MikeFriedman
        Originally Posted by dewalds86 View Post

        This is good to know. So if you just build back links to the main page for example it will help the whole web site.
        Not necessarily. It depends on the site structure.
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    • Profile picture of the author yukon
      Banned
      Originally Posted by dewalds86 View Post

      This is good to know. So if you just build back links to the main page for example it will help the whole web site.
      The link juice will flow to other pages on a domain that are linked from the Home page (your example page) but as the pages are nested further away from the Home page the more authority drops off.

      Example internal link, strong link to the ford page:
      • hxxp://cars.com/ford

      So If my link is on the Home page pointing to the ford page (hxxp://cars.com/ford), the mustang page (hxxp://cars.com/ford/mustang) is going to be weak because it's not a direct link from the Home page.

      If I wanted the mustang page to have a stronger link from the Home page I would link directly to the mustang page.
      • hxxp://cars.com/ford/mustang

      Keep in mind the Home page is only an example here, it's no different than any other page on the site. Any page can be built up to have authority.

      BTW, IMO it's not a good idea to rank a Home page, build internal landing pages that are focused on your keywords. That gives you way more options when ranking pages. One page (example, Home page) targeting dozens of keywords is poor SEO planning.
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      • Profile picture of the author SEO-Dave
        Originally Posted by yukon View Post

        BTW, IMO it's not a good idea to rank a Home page, build internal landing pages that are focused on your keywords. That gives you way more options when ranking pages. One page (example, Home page) targeting dozens of keywords is poor SEO planning.
        That's a very good point.

        I would add to the above the home page is just another landing page (I assume you optimize your home pages for at least one SERP Yukon?), so treat it no different to any other important webpage. Or put another way don't see your home page any different to any other webpage.

        You will find a site with good quality content others naturally link to will generate plenty of home page links. Think about how often a webmaster will refer to a site like moz.com as a good source of SEO info generally and just link to the home page. Happens a lot with bloggers, they'll link to the bloggers home page when referring to them.

        If you work on links to specific pages and have a sitewide link back to home, your home page will get a fair share of the link benefit you gain from building links. Because of how natural links tend to be generated, you'll probably have more PR going through the home page than any other page on the site.

        David
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        Freelance SEO Consultant
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        • Profile picture of the author habibkhan01
          Banned
          Not only depend on google traffic you can get traffic from social media moreover if your site is enriched with information you must get visitors.
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          • Profile picture of the author yukon
            Banned
            Originally Posted by habibkhan01 View Post

            Not only depend on google traffic you can get traffic from social media moreover if your site is enriched with information you must get visitors.
            ...but your selling PR10 backlinks for $5.
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    • Profile picture of the author Nick Logan
      Yes, definitely. This is also my experience!

      Originally Posted by dewalds86 View Post

      This is good to know. So if you just build back links to the main page for example it will help the whole web site.
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      *****
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  • Profile picture of the author Go4DBest
    You can bookmark some of these pages. You can try video promotion and marketing.
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    We setup and design wordpress sites using the Divi theme for roughly 200 USD. Let's talk.
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  • Profile picture of the author omarguabacontent
    You need to optimize the pages of your website. So make sure your keyword is in the title, H1 tag, image meta description, it should be bold and a couple of times in the body. You should also use some variations of the main keyword in the body of the article.
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