Ranking an authority site for many keywords

If there are few competing pages and if you get the on-site SEO right your post can move up to the top without any additional effort. Most times you'll need to get your link on other sites:

- Post the link on twitter and identi.ca
- Write a few articles with backlinks to your page( publish on sites like goarticles.com).
- Social bookmark: Digg, Stumbleupon etc



Jerry

You can do article submission, and set up a blog then put the content there. Remember to link the blog with your site. Commenting on others' blogs will also give you backlinks.

exactly. treat each post as if it were it's own website and as a benefit the work you do for each page will help the entire site as a whole.

I suppose that would work. It's a little different from my work flow.

Say you have a dating site.

You write an article / blog post about 'great ideas for a first date' , 'make a great first impression on your first date' and 'which date is the right date for sex'.

Three articles / blog posts with specific keywords but all fall into the niche of dating.

You don't need to worry too much about building backlinks to your index but instead you would do most of your backlinking and offsite SEO to each of those articles / blog posts separately as if they were each their very own web site or article on EZA or whatever.

Now, when people are searching for dating ideas, making a great impression or when they should have sex they are going to run into your site... or at least this is the goal, you want your site to pop up every time somebody is searching for dating related information.

And this is something you continue to build on. Depending on the depth of your site and how much content you intend to add you might or might not want to do this for every article / blog post.

This can be a slow process but it's not a whole lot different from trying to rank for several articles or websites at the same time.

By building up the authority of each of your articles individually you are making sure that they rank for their specific keywords and all of the articles on your site are going to work together boosting up the overall authority of your site.

Do this for about 10 articles covering the most important keywords in your niche and it would be safe to say that you now have an authority site

Not sure about that. The homepage will need as much support from backlinks as possible if she wants to create a one stop Amazon type site. Notice that with Amazon, all of their inner pages rank usually in the top few spots of Google. This is due down the homepage having a PR 9 and 188 million links pointing to it. Extreme example I know, but IMO that index page needs some major support.

very good point and here is my take on it...

We are writing articles / blog posts that we want to each rank for their respective keywords which is why it's a good idea to focus on building up the authority of each individual article / blog post. We don't want a single page ranking, we want as many articles as we can to rank well for each of their keywords.

If we were to take the reverse approach and focus on the index page. The index page is going to rank for it's generic keywords but the articles / blog posts themselves aren't going to rank as well. This leaves us in a situation where a single page (the index) ranks well but the individual articles / blog posts aren't ranking as well.

With the amazon example. Sure, authority will spill over from the index to individual pages and if there is no competition those pages will rank well but they are easy to beat because those pages have very little authority of their own and are only ranking due to a lack of competition.

If you build a site and only focus on the index and neglect your inner pages you'll run into the same problem which is why I think it's better to focus on the individual pages themselves.

This doesn't mean to ignore your index page completely. You do need to mix it up.

I don't think you need to worry so much about your index page. You need to worry about the pages you want to drive traffic too. I know... it's a crazy idea

I would rather diversify my efforts and have 10 blog posts that each target a specific keyword ranking on the first page then having my index page ranking on the first page for a single keyword and each of my articles being lost somewhere around page 5.

I see what you mean Jason! It does certainly seem like hard work to maintain a larger site. With micro-niche sites, you can make them pretty much laser targeted for keywords and visitors. Also, if one micro site loses rankings then you still have a network of sites to support you, but if the "big ship" goes down you're in trouble.