Every piece of online content you create should leave a big footprint. Unlike Sasquatch, you want to be found. That doesn’t mean strapping on clown shoes or work boots and splashing around in mud puddles; it means you need to optimize your content for search engines and visitors alike. Search engines love to follow links, and links that include keywords are like tasty treats to them—they’ll follow them like hounds. Visitors like short summations so they can decide if they want to track down the full meal. A great strategy to boost SEO is to give both search engines and visitors just what they want.
The main topic post
To create a preview post you have to have something to preview—that’s the main topic post. In the main topic post you can wax eloquently about the topic that is close to your heart, sparing no detail, leaving no prisoners and including pithy philosophies. In fact, this tip post that you’re reading now is a main topic post because it spells out how to use this strategy. It is linked to the preview post, Two blog posts are better than one.
Separating the posts
To keep the two posts separate and create a sense of discovery for the visitor, you should include the preview post in one location on your website and the main topic post in another spot. At AIMBIZ, we include the preview post on the home page and in the main blog page while the main topic post is located within a category blog page relevant to the topic, such as tips or tutorials. To accomplish this, you have to be able to separate blog posts by category, taxonomies or custom post type, all of which is basic stuff if you’re using AIM’s ThemeBlocks studio for WordPress, but can be accomplished in other themes using plugins such as Types to create an appropriate custom taxonomy for your main topic posts.
Creating the preview
The final step is to create the preview post. It should be short since the whole point is to create an easy-to-scan post that summarizes or intrigues the visitor. The preview post should also include an obvious link to the main topic post. Both preview and main topic posts should follow the rules for optimizing content, such as using relevant keywords, alt text, html tags and so on.
Earning clicks
Once you’ve polished your preview, it’s time to send it out to intrigue the online world via social media. Why not provide a preview to each of your social media communities and link straight to the main topic post? The reason for having them land on the preview is that they’ll have to click to another page if they want the full scoop, and that will avoid a bounce and help build your search engine equity.
We hope this strategy increases the internal click rate on your website and makes you filthy rich. If it does so, please let our readers know that you heard about it from AIM.