I continue to read about so many marketing experts solely focusing on the “lowest hanging fruit” by targetting keyword phrase with low competition. In fact, I can’t tell you how many software tools there are out there that help people find these magical phrases and some of which are pretty good.
But what about those highly competitive phrases that just seem impossible for which to rank? Have you ever said something like “Boy, I wish I could rank well for [insert impossible keyword here] because that would be life-changing”? Then you know exactly what I am talking about right?
Outside of the possibility of time travel back to say 1996, in order to fight this battle you have to understand Breadth of Coverage (a.k.a. BOC). This term comes from a Patent Google filed in 2003 describing BOC as one of the factors used to heuristically solve for the most qualified news article. This factor continues to play a more important role and consistently impacts site rankings in the organic algorithm.
So what is BOC? Simply stated it is the total number of qualified web pages in a domain that are thematically/semantically relevant to your keyword(s). Basically the more credible your pages the more authority you have on the subject matter which in turn means a greater opportunity for a fruitful placement in search results.
Here are some quick ideas to help you accomplish BOC:
- Use “Silos” by building a logical higharchy using related terms
Your home page will get the most incoming links meaning you should focus on your most competitve terms there. However, page rank will “trickle” down to your other pages so by creating a logical tree of relative themes off the home page creating “sub home pages” with their own sub pages you can get more related themes and keywords ranked as well. Just remember to do what you can to get some deeper well structured incoming links directly into your theme index (or silo home) pages.
- Make sure visitors (and search engine spiders) can easily crawl your pages via well structured links
Just like human visitors, search engine indexing spiders will crawl your site’s pages one at a time via the links you place. Also, the links themselves need to have the keyword your targeting in the link anchor itself telling the search engine what content to expect once it gets there. Best case, your link anchors will have the same keywords in them as the title tags of the destination pages.
- Try to avoid having to create multiple domains to cover all of your themes
It seems that more and more emphasis is being placed on brand favoritism especially as the web becomes more and more of a social network. It is becoming easier for internet users to tell the world what sites they like to visit simply by bookmarking the site on one of many social bookmarking sites. There also have been many advances in helpful toolbars being installed on PCs that are free but report back that users web activity and don’t think for a second that Google isn’t using this information to rank web sites.
What this means is that to rank well for top phrases it is becoming more and more important to focus on branding your site and not only getting people there but to get them there more often. Since this is all domain specific the more domains you actively manage the more of this you have to do. There are good reasons today to have multiple domains/sites in various situations because Google especially seems to like tightly themed web sites. But if you can successfully structure one larger site to carry all of these themes you benefit from the branding and link juice (page rank) built up all under that one domain.
- Concentrate on great content for your readers
This should go without saying but none of this is worth considering if you are publishing poor content. It’s like a vacuum cleaner salesmen going door-to-door selling broken vacuums. What’s the point? Creating good content takes time and effort but is worth it’s weight in gold. Do it once and it pays off over and over again. When creating content take a look at your competition (the sites currently ranking where you want to be) and focus on better quality, a braoder scope and depth in knowledge. Make sure to include keyword rich headlines and title tags on the page, more than 300 words, broken content logically subdivided into keyword rich sub-headlines and bullet points and don’t be affraid to link out to other sites with related content. This makes the site seem more natural.
Most important think Wikipedia. Make your content as noteworthy and useful as possible using robust content with powerful text, optimized images and video where possible.
So, this is somewhat of a simplified description of BOC (Breadth of Coverage) but is enough to give you a strong overall understanding. I hope this helps you better understand its necessity particularly when wanting to rank well for the more competitive terms and stay in the search engines for a long time to come.
