Have My SEO Cake & Eat It - Mix Viral Content & Business Content?

[RocketZando]

Hello,

I optimize for a fashion, eCommerce site which has catalogue pages and product pages.

http://www.zando.co.za/

We're currently working on a large "blog" which tons of great content designed to attract readers, links and tons of long tail traffic.

We'll be doing how-to videos, celeb interviews, top-tens, etc. etc. We'll even have a UGC community section eventually. Really great.

Now, I want to use the links generated by this section to rank for generics like this:

For example: I want to rank for "Lingerie" and I have this page set up as the target:

http://www.zando.co.za/women/clothing/lingerie/

I create some amazing content that generates lots of links containing the word "lingerie" .

That awesome content lives in:(hypothetical URL:)

http://www.zando.co.za/fashion/magazine/how-lingerie-has-changed-over-50-years/

I want to (and this is where you come in get people linking to my catalogue page (http://www.zando.co.za/women/clothing/lingerie/) where they can find a banner or something alluding to that piece of link bait (the /fashion/magazine/ url).

Perhaps similar to the Wordpress style  <read more="">page break on posts?</read>

Reason is, I want my "Money-Page" to get the links with "Lingerie" in it.

Problem is, it'll be another click to the thing they want to find. Also, say I decide a few months later that I want to do another piece, like "lingerie in films" and do the same.

My 'banner' idea would get very crowded or, it would mean that I bump the 50-years piece, which then makes for bad UX for readers clicking through looking for the old piece.

Or perhaps this can all be solved with good design?

Here's a WBF talking about mixing content:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/mixing-viral-content-with-business-content-whiteboard-friday

Does anyone have an example of someone doing this well?

PS. Was also thinking that on my "archive'' url, in between the content, I'll query for the top products that, that piece speaks to and make it possible for people to add to cart as they're reading the link bait content that is relevant to the product.

Cheers

Paul.

[TakeshiYoung]

One thing I've done before is putting the linkable content in a tab within the product page. Then set it so that you can directly access the content via a hashtag:

http://www.become.com/munro-shoes#guides

If you take away the the "#guides" in the example above, it will show you the product listing, and if you click on the tab in the upper right, it will show the content again. Since Google ignores hashtags for linking purposes, you can get people to link to the hashtagged content and still pass link juice to your main page.

That's a pretty big hack, though. The much easier solution is to just let the viral content be its own separate page, and just add a link from the viral content to your product page. The link will pass most of the link value that the viral pages acquires.

[RocketZando]

Hi Takeshi,

Yes, that's actually pretty good, since the hashed link will mean that everything can stay on one URL and I can retain the link juice.

Also, I'm thinking, if that hashed link can be 'caught' by some sort of jQuery code that will present that specific piece of link bait content in a dynamic block, that would be great.

Because then, what you could do is, when you have another link bait campaign with different content, you can get the code to display the content that is relevant to the click. So, if I'm clicking from Bob's Blog on a 'Lingerie in Films' link that has  www.{....}.php#lingerie-films hash link, that function catches it and presents that piece of bait content first thing in the page.

Any thoughts guys? Any other solutions perhaps? I do think this one has potential.