Attract more visitors with Horizontal Content

Horizontal Content - the answer to Search Engine ranking quest?

We see many articles advising those new to blogging or article writing to focus on one niche topic; in other words - one narrow vertical. So-called experts have advised that the way to gain credibility, links and ultimately website visitors, is to provide tight, topic-centric content. But is keeping it content narrow really the best way to go?

For some, it may be, if you are targeting a very specific market niche, who won't be interested in content not about that particular topic.
But another option is to cover as much ground as you possibly can. Throw a wide net out there and see what you catch. Once you see what you've caught, maybe you can catch more in the same area. The thinking is that the more ground you cover, the more people you are potentially exposing your work to. This is termed going horizontal, rather than vertical.

Naturally, with horizontal content websites, the more resources you have, the better off you will be. That is why big companies with deep pockets find the horizontal content angle so attractive. They can afford to pay to have a lot of people create content. In paid search, they can afford to bid on keywords across the board.

But just because it's easier for a big company to go horizontal, that doesn't mean a small business or a blogger/writer can't keep the same principle in mind.

An example is my babyboomers website www.babyboomersguide.co.nz
The object of that website was to attract babyboomers who might be interested in buying my last book - aimed at the babyboomer generation. But what are babyboomers interested in? That covers a lot of topics: travel, lifestyle, health, music, sports, Internet, politics, books, food, drink, family, etc, etc.
So it was a typical Horizontal Content website and succeeded in attracting good numbers of visitors. The secondary objective - to promote sales of my babyboomer's book was achieved and the book sold out.

Another great example is http://amazingarizona.com/
If you want to know anything about Arizona - this website will provide. And, when you are browsing the website, you might just be interested in the properties we have listed.

Small businesses can find success in e-commerce, despite the fact that big, commercial websites are only a click away. A horizontal content website is a good way to go. But if you intend having a huge amount of content, it doesn't mean that quality should be sacrificed. Search engines want quality, as do users (who also like to share quality content via social networks). Search engines like Google want to deliver the highest quality results possible to the user, and they're getting better and better at doing this all the time.

You may not be an expert in everything. Who is? There are different ways to construct quality content in areas you are less familiar with. For one, obviously, you can get experts to write content for you in any given niche. You can also perform thorough research before tackling a specific topic. The more you learn along the way, the more knowledgeable you will be anyway, and what is an expert if not someone that has a thorough understanding of a subject?

If you can cover more ground, you can attract a wider audience, which means more traffic, which means more likelihood of achieving the main goals of the website.