Google's Panda update left many site owners scrambling. Sites with lots of high quality content usually came through all right, but lots of site owners realized they may need to rebuild from scratch. If you're one of those, or if you hope to populate a new site with a lot of winning content, keep reading.
Randy Ray covered this topic three years ago. Despite the article's age and ostensible focus on affiliate websites, I think it's even more relevant today in the wake of Panda. For one thing, Ray takes the long view to adding content to your site and ranking it; he advocates taking a year to build out 1,000 pages of content (and explains how to make this a reachable goal). But what I really like about this piece is how he shows you to take your idea for a site and break it down into its constituent topics.
Depending on your site's topic, if you do this right you're going to end up with lots of evergreen content that will keep ranking for a long time. Your visitors will appreciate this, and so will the search engines. Evergreen content, as long as you keep it up to date, ages well; it continues attracting links over time. If you publish multiple pages of evergreen content, you can appeal to a wider variety of visitors, and increase your traffic.
But if you want multiple pages of quality content, you need lots of ideas that can be turned into great articles. Where do you get these ideas? Ray recommends that you start by using one word to describe your site's topic. You then break the topic down into sub-topics, using one or even several different approaches.
Ray uses a football site he built as an example. His goal, as I mentioned earlier, was to create 1,000 pages of content. Maybe you don't want or need to do that for your site, but it's a worthwhile target. You may need to make adjustments depending on your niche. So, how does one go about building 1,000 pages of content on football?
You can start by adding specific words to the root word that give you meaty topics to discuss. So you might start by talking about football offense, football defense, and football special teams. With a general overview article on football, you now have 996 topics to go. Okay, how about separate articles on professional football and college football? Now you're down to 994 topics.
How about a separate page for each football team? There are 32 professional football teams, taking you down to 962 pages. At the college level you'll find about 119 teams, leaving you with 841 topics to create. That's still a lot of topics, so where do you go from here?
Ray notes that each of the topics we've already mentioned can be further broken down into their own sub-topics. For example, you can do a page on each player on the professional teams; at 53 players per team, by the time you've covered all 32 professional teams you've more than met your goals. You can do pages on each of the team's mascots – what they are, their history, their typical routines, etc. You can branch off into fantasy football. You can write articles on great retired players. Really, if you're enthusiastic about the topic, you'll never run out of material.
Search Optimization 
