Michael Martinez has an interesting article over at seomoz.org about Golden Pages, named after the Golden Ticket from “Willy Wonka“. He has an interesting take on how some pages on your site unexpectedly turn into something more that you thought they would. His example is his website’s white cheese dip page. He created this page just to share with a couple friends, nothing more. His friends thought it was a great resource and linked to it. More people found it and now when you search for things like white cheese dip or chili con queso, his page is normally on the first page.

This idea is different than link baiting. You may remember Jackie Binion’s link baiting article from April that explains that with link bait, you are trying to create a page that people will link to; your goal is to make a page so compelling that people feel the need to link to.

A golden page, by contrast, is one that was created because you wanted to create the page. It is a page that you wanted to display or one that you put up because you love the topic. It does not have to be a recipe; it can be anything you want.

Of course, just because you create such a page on your own travel and tourism website, it will not necessarily become a Golden Page – these pages cannot be contrived. Like Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket, Golden Pages are something unexpected that lift your spirits and give a great prize… more traffic to your site instead of a journey inside a candy factory.

The only way to get a Golden Page is to create pages on a normal basis, and hope that one of them is something people really want to see. Fortunately, creating more pages on your site also helps build content, which shows a benefit in the search engines. So even if you don’t make a Golden Page, you will help your search engine rankings with the additional pages.

Josh Green – Blizzard Internet Marketing, Inc.

 

Categories: SEM, SEO, Travel Marketing.
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