On today’s blog we are looking at content topics for SEO and specifically which types of content earn the most links from external sites and therefore offer the most SEO benefits.
This post was inspired by a great blog over at Majestic SEO where David Kenning recently created an epic post after painstakingly analysing more than 10,000 articles on the Bbc News website – awesome job David. You can read his full blog post here.
We recently did a post about how to earn links from the BBC (summary: not easy but not impossible). But it is really interesting to turn it around and look at it from the opposite point of view – what items of content on the BBC news site earn the most links from external websites.
This matters because, as David says in his post, the BBC’s website is one of the internet’s “Powerhouses” (great word). And also because if we discover the types of content which garner the most links on there it will give us some interesting insights into the nature of stories which win links across the web as a whole and therefore what might work well for our own SEO efforts.
BBC news has huge authority in the eyes of Google and other search engines, and the numbers of sites linking in both reflects and helps to create this position. David found that during only a 90 day period the site earned more than 500 million external backlinks from just under 750,000 different domains. Wow.
Top Five
In terms of which stories earned the most links the Top Five was dominated by health stories. A Story about surgery waiting times in the NHS Earned Links from 4,350 different domains making it the single most popular linked to story during the period of David’s investigation.
Next popular in terms of links won was a story about childhood obesity, specifically a report that a TV in a kid’s bedroom was likely to make them fat. This earned links from 4,288 domains.
The third most popular story was one about a new drug for ovarian cancer which had performed well in trials. This picked up 4,247 links, while a report about washing hands in cold water being as effective for germ control as hot water won 4,178 links and a story about the decline of global diarrhoea deaths earned 4,128 links to complete the Top Five. There’s a lot more data on the Majestic blog so if you want to know more do click here and take a look.
For our purposes the study reveals that health and wellbeing posts provide a fertile ground for link earning. This is obviously great news if you are offering products or services in this area. But even if you are not it’s worth brainstorming with your teams to see what health angles you might be able to apply to your own content.
But take care to offer genuine content with credibility. If you just try to jump on the bandwagon you could be seen as insincere. Health stories are serious and need careful handling. But done right they can be a fantastic strategy for earning links to your website.
ENDS
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