Coattail marketing and SEO

I have a person who does online and distance education that covers the work done by many well known authors and institutions. He wants to use the names of these authors and institutions in his keywords. The result being that after much pruming he still has a list of 34 keyword phrases.

He has done a lot of SEO shopping and he says that some of the big SEO firms will in fact contract to optimize for up to 50 keywords. Their prices will be different depending on how many keywords you want them to optimize for.

To my knowledge the only way to do that would be with the use of doorway pages. Does anyone know any other way?

What he wants to do is like a Baseball Training Camp that in addition to optimizing for "learn baseball", "power hitting" and "how to throw a curve ball" also wants to optimist for each of the top 30 names in the baseball hall of fame.

How would you optimize a Baseball school web site for "Mickey Mantle" and "Sammy Sosa"?

 

Why not one page per key phrase? Then make it clear on each page what the SITE has to offer with clear links to the main page / action page.

We have up to 500 product pages per site. No way SEO can be done indeed for just the homepage for say 500 x 2 phrases. That's why we treat each page as a separate entity as far as SEO is concerned.

For one page, yes problematic indeed. For multi page site it can be done.

 

Bob, I thought you had all the answers? What's this, something you're not sure of? Gasp! I'm afraid the world might be coming to an end. Everybody prepare for Armageddon!!! Satan has sprung forth from the gates of hell……

Just kidding Bob, after all the crap you’ve given for stupid, er, I mean, simple questions in the past, I just couldn’t resist

 

Very funny

But I don't think it is a stupid question. I can see doing this for products one is selling. In fact it is the only way. But a baseball School isn't selling Sammy Sosa. Even if the site devoted an entire page to Sammy Sosa it would still be an also ran in the SERPs. There are entire sites dedicated to Sammy Sosa, and a single page on a Baseball School site surely isn't what people who are searching for Sammy Sosa are looking for.

 

You'd think that entire sites would always rank better than a single page about a subject. But with my site, since I cover so many different subjects based on the , for many of the k/w that I target for my sponsors products and/or services, I am able to get the site to rank all the way up to #1 in some cases (granted they are not real competitive, but they still outperform even the sponsor's own website). I think if you work it right, you can be very sucessful for a single page.

 

I have to think that one keyword or phrase per page would be the ticket. No need for doorways if you have all the phrases they want to rank for and then optimize each page for that phrase. The difficult part with this will be making it flow, but you are a smart character (and I do mean character), you can make it happen.

 

Surely the doorways option should not even be an option, surely?

 

It isn't as far as I'm concerned. I just told the client that the other guys must have intended to use doorway pages, because they never talked to him about expanding his web site to include these coattail pages.

 

Another, although slim, possibility is that the firm(s) he talked with owns or operates sports related sites already. If they do, and have the resources, they could quickly develop the content (or edit existing content) using the keywords/anchortext to optimize the clients site for the intended phrases.

The odds of that are slim though. Based on the info you've provided my guess would be doorway pages as well. Some off page work is great, but the fact that they didn't mention doing any work to the clients site is a red flag imo.

 

So what is the difference between having:

a) on our shop one page about massagers and another about sinus irrigation

and

b) on that baseball camp site one page about baseball camp and another about Sammy Sosa

??

IMO b) is actually more related site wide than a). So why would it work for a shop and not on a baseball camp site with complementary information?

 

well, two things come to mind immediately.

first, you wouldn't want to optimize a baseball school website for Mickey Mantle or Sammy Sosa. you'd want to optimize for keywords relating to baseball school. Mickey Mantle and Sammy Sosa, while they might get hits, aren't going to give you quality traffic. they're also going to be extremely difficult to optimize for.

second, though, not all "doorway" pages are bad. the traditional doorway pages that are used to just spam, yes, those are, but if you use "doorway" pages to deliver something useful to the people searching for what it's optimized for, and it's done in a decent way, there's nothing wrong with that.

I'd say the way to go is to definitely have a seperate page for each of these related terms you're going to try optimizing for.

 

Another option might be to produce several satellite sites to support the main site. You can have 3 or 4 sites, all running content from searchenginecloaker.com products, then just point the pages toward the main site.

As long as you are cloaking for related terms, it really isn't all that bad.

Cloaking has a bad rep but can be really useful.

Especially for a product like this (Lots of neiche terms to be aiming for).

 

Cloaking presents risks to the client. Are good rankings for an undetermined amount of time (until you get caught) worth taking the chance of having the client's site banned from Google's index?

I agree that having some satellite sites would be helpful (more helpful than just single pages), but if it were me I would develop the content on those sites myself. Why take any chances? Sports related content isn't all that difficult to develop.

 

For me I would be making a directory

/example/

and a page/pages

example.htm
examples.htm

and I would be placing "example" content down on that page - the linking strategy is self evident as is the title, H1, description, etc and the individual site maps for the categories.

The answer is that because you start getting lesser competition in the 3 word phrases etc you get no1 positions and these point back and support your main or sub main pages