Pillar Content

I'm a newb here but not to the SEO world. I figured I'd do a little intro post that might get the wheels turning a bit. This idea is nothing new but a lot of people overlook this somewhat easy way to build trust cheaply. Recently I've been focusing my efforts on creating pillar content for our sites with the main goal of building domain authority and diversifying our link profile (cut down the homepage link %). Linkbait has had me frustrated so now I like to target content that is established and do a different twist on it...then simply email sites linking to that content.

For example, let's say I have an SEO firm, I could logically place a glossary of internet terms or history of the internet page. It may be slightly off topic but it could be worked into the site in a relevant manner. I would have a writer create the content then go through the backlinks of a high quality page like this: http://www.matisse.net/files/glossary.html. That page has approximately 13,000 links. I'm sure I could get onto 50-100 pages from the first 1000 backlinks.

It may seem like a lot of tedious work but it's pretty cost effective. The content would cost a few hundred dollars and it would take 20-30 hours on the linkbuilder's part (depending on how tailored the link requests were). Do 5-10 of these for a site, say half directly relevant and the other half that are a bit of a stretch like the example above. Total direct cost for a project like this would be ~$2k plus the opportunity cost of your linkbuilding time. But, keep in mind these are permanent, free links and totally white hat! It's a great way to build SE friendly domain (aka not rented) authority that you can then sculpt with better anchor text *paid* links.