Practical Blogging Tips: Build Comprehensive Content

When was the last time you used a search engine to find information about something but didn’t find you what you wanted? Other people are probably running into the same problem. Have you considered creating the content yourself? Let me give you an example of a blog post that could be turned into comprehensive content.

A Starting Point: Image Gallery

Blogger Sunny posted a couples gallery for DWTS 6 – Dancing With the Stars Season 6 – at Popsofa. Whether you like it or not, this has become a popular TV show. I happen to like ballroom dancing, so I like watching this series. In my opinion, the 12 professional dancers each season are what makes the series worth watching, though some of the stars aren’t half bad (John O’Hurley was robbed in Season 1 – robbed, I tell ya.)

But a gallery of 12 pictures does not constitute “comprehensive content”. How do you turn the gallery into comprehensive content? You do this by adding a variety of other information that fans will be searching for, and linking to it all from the gallery (or a Season 6 index post, in an easy to navigate manner. (Just make sure that a link to the gallery is visible somewhere in a “feature box” or in the navigation bar, for the duration of the series. It’s your main entry page to the comprehensive content, and you want regular, incidental, and search visitors to be able to see it immediately – not have to search for it.)

The Missing Content: What Should Be Included

DWTS 6 launches Mar 17th, and there will likely be a lot of search traffic before, during, and after each episode. Build for that traffic NOW, giving yourself about 1.5 weeks to produce comprehensive, authority content about the series and about each celebrity participant for Season 6. Here’s what you could include, both now and during the series.

1. Couples Gallery. Gallery of DWTS 6 couples, plus any alternate shots. (Popsofa’s DWTS 6 couples gallery uses the Fancy Zoom WP plugin, from WP Elements, to “lightbox” the gallery images. Though due to caching issues, you may not get the lightboxing effect.)
2. Participant list. List of couple pairings, with links from each celebrity and professional name to their own profile page.
3. Dancer profiles. Profile of each professional dancer, how many seasons they’ve been on the show, their background, and a pic or two.
4. Celebrity profiles. Profiles of each celebrity participant, their background, their chances (ongoing, after each episode), what else they’re up to.
5. Episodic analysis. Analysis of each episode, from your point of view.
6. Couples synopses. For example, each participating couple would get a synopsis page that has video clips and commentary.
7. Easy index. A handy index page that is visible on your home page for the duration of the series. (This could be the couples gallery page, or a “season 6” index page.)

Why Do It?

In total, you’d have at least 1 (gallery/ index) + 24 (personal profiles) + 12 (couples synopses) + 1 (Season 6 summary page) = 38 pages. Plus there’ll be the X episode summary pages.

That’s an example of what I’m calling comprehensive content that, if done well, can be evergreen. It could draw traffic to your site for the next several years. I did something similar for the Hell’s Kitchen reality cooking series, but dropped the ball by not including picture galleries and personal profiles. (Though it’s harder to do profiles on unknown contestants.) Still, every time there’s a new season, I get spikes in traffic.

The search spiders will be salivating at all your “authoritative” content, rich with text, images and video, and all focused on one keyphrase: “Dancing With the Stars”, as well as the keyword DWTS. And readers will very likely visit next season, to see what you have to say for season 7. Of course, you can apply this methodology to many niches or different TV shows, in case you don’t like ballroom dancing or reality cooking shows. One event to consider: the upcoming 2008 Summer Olympics in China.