Content is King! Content is King!

[captainccs]

Twice now our marina website has been found by people looking for snow in Venezuela, one from Argentina and now another one from France. Yes, Venezuela has some snow but, clearly it is not associated with marinas. In addition to the half dozen pages about the marina itself, we have a lot of information pages for visitors who want to tie up at our marina and go exploring the country. On our "Explore Venezuela from Marina Bahia Redonda" page we have the following description:
Would you believe it that you can find snow in Venezuela? The State of Mérida in western Venezuela is a beloved vacation place. Pico Bolivar at over 5,000 meters (15,000 feet) is the highest peak in Venezuela. You can visit Pico Espejo by cable car. As far as I know, that is the only mention of snow in the whole website but, since very few Venezuelan websites talk about snow, the search phrase: "venezuela in snow" put us as number ONE on the results page!

Yes, content is king!

The concept of "long tail" is a very important one for SEO. If you only have a few pages, it is very difficult to develop more than a few keywords or key phrases but if you have hundreds of pages, you can develop hundreds of them. For us "marina," "Caribbean," "boatyard" and other boating terms are our core key phrases to which I have dedicated a lot of attention (title tags, meta tags, h tags and so on), but by adding lots of pages with good text, we have created a long tail. These long tail key phrases are low relevance and each one brings us very few visitors but they add up when you have hundreds of them.

Adding pages to a website costs very little, so go for it!

I hope this link to Wired is OK.
The Long Tail
Forget squeezing millions from a few megahits at the top of the charts. The future of entertainment is in the millions of niche markets at the shallow end of the bitstream.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.10/tail.html

[Dave Hawley]

That's the beauty of forums too. Why not start one yourself?

[captainccs]

I love forums and I set up one for the marina early in the life of the website but it was a total failure. For one, I could not get the staff to use it. They speak some English but are not fluent and they refused to post. Back then we didn't have Wi-Fi yet so very few people were online at any time and only when they went to the onshore Internet Cafe. Back then they just checked their email but surfed very little because the Internet Cafe charged by the hour.

Also, the management was not thrilled with the idea of an unsupervised forum and they don't pay me enough to do it. Spammers are just one problem, they were worried about security, about bad news spreading through the forum -- so we canceled it.

[ihelpyou]

Good stuff Cap!

The adding of content/pages is probably the hardest thing to get a site to do. Employees are either lazy and don't want to do it, or they just don't get paid anything to do it. Some client sites don't add new content either through a blog or an article module, and then wonder why they don't get found for those long tail phrases. They don't want to pay anyone to write content either. Wanting cake and then wanting to eat it as well comes to mind. :)

Yeah, a forum requires babysitting constantly. If not, it goes the way of many out there which seem abandoned, and taken over by spammer posts.

[fred333]

That is very true that forums are a rough to maintain. I know my company, [URL Removed by Connie] we specialize in content writing and the whole package when it comes to website management.

Original content is the best thing for any website.

[Connie]

If you joined the forum to be helpful, you are welcome. If you only joined to drop links you will find those links wont last long and you'll soon soon be banned.

Whether this is :hi: Hi! or By! is up to you.

[SEFL]

That's the joy of content cap: organic search traffic for phrases you would never even have thought of. Good on you, bro.