Back for more. I'm very interested in this idea. On Oct. 11, after reading your article, I created a test page for this concept for my elder care services website. The test page is at
Top Caregiving Agencies in North San Diego County - A Servant's Heart In Home Care - San Diego In Home Caregivers and you get to it by navigating to the "Resources" page in the main nav and then you click on the last link on the Resources page.
So far, Google hasn't indexed that page, although it has indexed all the blog posts that we have published on the site since then.
I'm sort of surprised by this. In your experience, did it take a long time for that page to get indexed, since it wasn't accessible via the main nav?
Thanks!
On the indexing, how often do you update that page? Sounds like it's only been 9 days - if you don't update that page that often Google probably doesn't crawl it that often either.
That said, as is that page probably won't perform really well anyway. I had someone else PM me a similar thing where the page was extremely light on content.
You really have to make this a high quality page...not just a copy of a directory.
The goal is to
make this page more useful to the people searching your target keyword than any other page that exists.
Ask yourself this question: "Does this page give the person searching my target keyword what they're looking for in a way that is better, more useful, more entertaining, etc, than everything else out there?"
If the answer is no, or kind of, or a little bit, then it probably won't be effective.
That birthday parties page has over 2000 words of unique content. This page is actually useful. Imagine how long it would take, if you were a parent, to review all the websites for these places? You still wouldn't get all this info because we actually called a few of them to clarify some things.
Your page has 205 words. 10% of ours.
Another example:
This "cincinnati web design" page on our site:
20 Awesome Web Design Companies in Cincinnati - Razorlight Media
There are over 10,000 words on that page. We put together a questionnaire of things people might want to know that they couldn't already find online about the web design companies in Cincy.
Then we emailed it to all of them. The ones that responded are posted there.
After a bit that page was performing pretty well for searches like "cincinnati web design companies" or "cincinnati web design agency," but wasn't at the top.
I thought, "what else could people want when researching a web design company?"
To view their portfolio is probably the #1 thing - so we improved it incrementally by adding links directly to each company's portfolio.
It's now #1-2 for those terms.
But it's still at the mid-bottom of the page for the more general "cincinnati web design."
If it stays there I might try to figure out how to make it even better.
The point is, if it's not genuinely awesome, the search engines aren't going to see any of the signals that indicate, "HEY!! Awesome content here!! People love this!! Rank it high!!"
Hope that makes sense.
