A successful search engine marketing strategy requires that you make use of a wide variety of web pages. Welcome to the world of sleepers, rockets and honey pots!

Read any search engine marketing blog today and you will find articles on how to make link bait, that is blog headlines and posts that lures diggers to vote for you and other bloggers to link to you.

There is nothing wrong in this: An article called “5 ways to make love in zero gravity” is bound to generate a few links and visitors. Some of them may even sign up for your newsletter or subscribe to your Web feed.

However, there is more to developing an attractive, content rich, site than writing snappy headlines.

People tend to forget that over a year an article that attracts 10 visitors a day will generate more traffic than one diggable post that attracts 3000 in one week only.

if you want to develop a web site that generates a large number of page views over time, you must work on developing different types of web pages. Here is a tongue-in-cheek typology that may help you with your planning.

Rockets

Rockets are articles that manage to catch the interest of web sites and readers right now. The point is to be there first with the news, so that your site is the one all the other bloggers and search sites are linking to. Not only do you generate a lot of links that way, you also get a lot of traffic.

In order to make this happen. however, you have to have your ear to the ground. Moreover, you need to have the time to write that article right away — every hour counts.

Rockets are not always about the latest news, however. An article that presents a solution to a common problem in an original way may also become a rocket, even if the problem has been around for a while.

The buzz created by such an article may lead to a significant number of new readers and new subscribers. This is actually more important than the number of ad views your article may generate.

As we argued in our article “Search engine marketing spillovers”, the snow ball effect caused by such a post can be impressive: Among those new subscribers and new regular readers, there may be webmasters and bloggers that will link to you at a later time.

Sleepers

You should not aim at making a new rocket every time you write an article, however.

First of all, you have to write articles that serves your regular audience, but that is not equally attractive for prominent bloggers or diggers. You have to take care of your regular readers. These are the people that are interested in your topic and that are most likely to buy your product or click on your ads.

A sleeper is an article that does not take off like a rocket. Instead of thousands, you get a few hundred readers the first week — or even less. Still, in the long run this article may outperform a successful rocket.

This is why:

The search engines love good content and aim at listing articles that helps searchers find the information that they are looking for.

Your article may be focusing on a rather narrow topic (let’s say “Innovation policy in the Scandinavian countries”), but in a world with 6 billion inhabitants there are bound to be quite a few that are looking for information on this topic. “Quite a few” may add up to tens of thousands. This is “the long tail” Chris Anderson is talking about.

These people will find your article using the search engines (if you follow our advice on search engine optimization that is). Some of these readers will be webmasters that find your article so interesting that they link to it. In the less competitive areas of the Web, one inbound link from a related site may give you a nice little boost in your search rankings — especially for search queries that contain more than two words.

Late Bloomers

A sleeper will never become a rocket, but it may become a late bloomer.Society is constantly changing, and what used to a passion shared by few, may over time become common place. Today everyone is an environmentalist.

There may even come a time when your carefully crafted article on Nordic innovation may become a reference point on the Net. Suddenly the French and the Germans realize that “the Nordic model” may provide a solution to a problem they themselves have not solved: strong economic growth coupled with a well developed welfare society.

You may also write a sleeper with the intent of it becoming a late bloomer. You can write articles on every contender for the next US presidential election. If you believe that Oslo will become the venue for the 2018 Winter Olympics, put up that reference site today!

Duds

There are articles that never will succeed, by a lack of fortune or, normally, due to a lack of quality.

The Web is full of duds. Such articles may attract a few readers down at the other end of the long tail, but when these people read your article, they will be sorely disappointed and never come back again.

Moreover: If 10 000 blogs have covered the role of Web 2.0 in search engine marketing, another article on the topic will normally not make an impression. Your only chance will be to present the phenomenon from at totally new perspective.

Honey Pots

The growth of the blogsphere has made many forget that Web sites may be more than blog posts and articles. At Pandia, the most popular pages are not articles, but all-in-one resource collections like our Search Engine Detective, Pandia People Search and the Pandia Newsfinder.

We have gathered links to the best and most important search oriented sites on the Web on single pages, adding search forms for good measure.

These pages are the honey pots of Pandia. They attract a large number of links and visitors.

There are marketing experts out there that will tell you that you should keep the number of outbound links to a minimum, as you are bound to loose visitors that way. The philosophy is that people who click on a link i an all-in-one link collection or a directory will move to another site, never to come back again.

That might happen. But quite a few will remember that you helped them find what they were looking for, and they will come back for more. (You do go back to Google, don’t you?) Then there will be those that become curious and start exploring your site. Who knows, one of them may even write a blog post about your site.

Screwdrivers

One variant of the honey pot category is the screwdriver. A screwdriver is a piece of online software that provides a service. A search engine is an obvious example, a currency converter another.

A good example of a popular screwdriver in the search engine marketing arena is seomoz’ Page Strength calculator . The folks over at seomoz noticed the interest for Google’s PageRank, and developed a new and more sophisticated measure for web site success. It is reasonable to expect that a few of the users of this service become company clients.

The technology for developing online software (javscript, ajax etc.) is now pretty mature and stable, and a lot of sites are helping webmasters develop their own services. We believe this will lead to a new interest in the role of honey pots in online search marketing.

Pubs

Finally there are the pubs of the World Wide Web or — rather — the social web. Put up a service that let’s people write the content for your. Add comments to your blog, a discussion forum to your Web site, or buy 50000 used servers and invite people to publish their videos on your site.

But if you do: Make sure that you have the time to take care of your customers. A pub full of drunks (i.e. a site full of spam) does not make a good impression.