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I agree w/ @wesleysmits, but there's another interesting idea. So:

• Post every 2 weeks (as suggested by @wesleysmits)
• Subscribe to something like hittail.com ($10/mo), and write blog articles for a all the long tail keywords it suggests (YMMV). The way it works is HitTail will find a bunch of long-tail keywords e.g. "How do I replace my Samsung Galaxy battery?" users used to find your site. It'll suggest some blog titles that you write, and you just crank those out. These articles will tend to hit good ranks on these specific keywords, and bring in trickles. Build enough trickles into your site, you get a stream.

One of the things you can do is to look into your Moz (which uses organic search keywords) for keywords that you can write about. Are there any patterns to questions/queries that people are using to find your topics?

Then, you can do some Googling to find what kinds of related keywords are interested in. Hang out where the target audience hangs out, and try to find the questions that they're asking; the answers they wish they had. Content Marketing Institute had an article yesterday titled "Why Your Web Content Strategy Should Include Answering Questions" that covers this idea.

HitTail is a separate snippet that you can embed into your website to extract "article suggestions". Personally, I prefer Google Analytics. If the client doesn't give you access to GA, then you can ask them to generate a keyword report.

Oh, one last thought: ask the client what questions they get asked the most? (Make sure you don't write what the client wants to say. You want to write posts to the client's queries, and use exact match keywords to make sure you're the most relevant article on the whole Internet for that exact match keyword.)

Best of luck — Andrew

Hey Tim,

I agree with your strategy.

There should be little reason why the same content would change in ranking. If the text, the internal linking, the # of pages are the same, the url's... the spiders shouldn't be bothered much.

I also think changing a few pages at a time is the strategic thing to do.

--Andrew

At first blush, I'd say this: If I were you, I would host the content on a separate subdomain than your subdomain. I would want the freedom to choose a content management system/blog that gave me the freedom to aggressively pursue on-page SEO/content creation.

But to make sure we leave no stone unturned: do you have any pages in the storefront with SEO value that might make you think twice about jumping to the subdomain?

Hey Fuel Interactive --

To answer your specific question, I would use the meta (noindex, follow) tag instead of the canonical. It doesn't pass authority, but it is the correct usage. It will strike the page from ranking consideration, and allow the overall course page to have less competition.

Another question for you: is the article listing page already ranking higher than the overall course page, or is this a worry? If it's a worry, I recommend testing it out first so you don't prematurely optimize. Just a thought.

Hope that helps -- Andrew

We've also noticed that we get the "..." even though we're at 66 chars.

Another thing we've noticed (and this may not be due to the update) is that Google will rewrite our <title>to put the brand name in the front. For example:</p> <ul> <li>Keyword Phrase 1 - Keyword Phrase 2 - Brand </li> <li>Gets rewritten to:</li> <li>Brand: Keyword Phrase 1 - Keyword Phrase 2</li> </ul> <p> </p></title>

Np! I asked about the competitiveness aspect b/c it might behoove you to redirect your marketing energies elsewhere, i.e.

• Focus on building followers (i.e. social media) (spread versus rank)
• Syndicate your content beyond your current affiliates (watermarked, ofc) on other sites to drive traffic that way
• Make an special effort to make your content "thicker" to see if the rise in rankings is worth the increase in writing time

Without knowing the ins' and outs' of your work, those would be two of my guesses. I wouldn't be surprised if there is social media specifically friendly to your niche.

P.S. Yikes on the traffic!

My recommendation is that you give each article its own page and unique link. It may take some doing, but here's why you should:

• Having its own page gives each article a chance to rank
• The aggregate's page keeps changing, so its rankings will constantly be changing as its keyword makeup changes

Article feeds ought to be structured like Wordpress homepages:

• With

Like I said; it's not the 'easy' answer, but it conforms to best SEO practices.

Hope that helps! -- Andrew

Hey cjkimber,

That's actually a common dilemma. Many sites prefer to "meta no-index" your tag pages, to remove those tags from consideration in ranking. That way your primary page (and all others) will rank higher than the tags.

The easy way to do that is to download the Yoast SEO plugin for Wordpress. In the plugin, you can noindex the content by clicking:

SEO (sidebar) > Title & Metas (sidebar) > Taxonomies (tab) > Tags > {Select "noindex, follow"}

There are a lot of other tools that will help you out w/ other parts of your SEO in the plugin.

Does that answer your question?

-- Andrew