Okay, I know that the new way of business seems to be creating a huge site. However, this really has me missing the niche site days. Here’s why:
With a niche site you were really only ever focused on one keyword. You wrote pretty much everything in the book on that keyword. If someone landed on your site, then every single page on the site was intended to help the reader with that keyword. Most of my good niche sites have about 20 posts. The home page is keyword optimized, but the other pages were just intended as a resource. Some of the other pages ended up getting quite a bit of traffic, but that was merely by accident (no keyword targeting involved).
The new approach seems to be write one post about the keyword and move on. Do this with hundreds or thousands of keywords. For those who are really dedicated, write 5 more posts on a keyword. Then link those 5 posts to your original post. If someone lands on one of these pages, good luck finding the other 5 posts that pertain to this keyword. Oh and the sidebar isn’t going to help you much, because well it’s got like a million other keywords going on there.
This has been a big mental roadbock for me. I want to create a large site with lots of quality, but organizing this type of site is a nightmare. WordPress category pages are difficult to manipulate. WordPress sidebars are also difficult to manipulate. In addition to this, creating a site like this takes an intense amount of planning. First you find the categories that you are targeting. Then you have to use Fraser’s tool to find long tails in those categories (Fraser’s tool has a rather steep learning curve in my opinion. It’s loading keywords all over the place and so far I have yet to be able to manage the thing). Hopefully some of the long tails you find actually fit in the category. Then you have to try and set up your site in a way that is useful to the visitor (good luck with the sidebars and category pages). Finally after you have exhausted yourself trying to figure this all out, you need to start pumping out 1000′s of long tail articles. If you are simply targeting long tails with low competition (using Fraser’s KEI method) then chances are your site as a whole isn’t offering a very comprehensive resource. You’ll be hitting X, Y, and Z of your category, but you won’t have written anything on A, B, and C. Oh, and to boot, if you don’t have a legitimate homepage with news articles on it, then you will be considered a content farm. Tack on another 1000 articles and a few videos and podcasts.
I’m not trying to create a perfect site over night, but this type of site seems like it would take, well, 11 years to get there. Hopefully nothing changes in the next 11 years.
