This is something I’ve discovered by mistake, on the only mini site where I had a description of what it was about in the sidebar. The description was on all the pages of the site, in the sidebar.

It went along these lines (not the actual one that was used):

“Website Name” is a place where you will find my experiences with different gadgets I’ve bought and used, accompanied by the price and the occasional full review.

As you can see, nothing fancy, and written in 2 minutes just because the template I was using had a special place for a description. The outcome was that besides the traffic from the 6-7 keywords I was targeting with that mini-site, I also got a few visitors a week from people looking for the price or a review for those products. Obviously not enough to make a difference in terms of revenue for that mini-site, but it was one of those moments of thinking “Well, duhh, of course it might rank for blue widget reviews if the word reviews is on the same page with blue widget, even if it isn’t in the content but in the sidebar.“

So, the combo of “any product or company you might be mentioning in an article” and “a word like review or price”, can get you ranking for that term if the competition is really low.

I didn’t have a chance to test it thoroughly yet, but it’s something I want to try on more blogs and mini-sites and see what kind of impact it makes. Obviously, this needs to be adapted to the topic of the site/blog.

If you have a gadget blog, words like review, price, warranty might be something people will look for. If you’re writing about a celebrity gossip, I’d imagine not too many would look for a Britney Spears Review. Instead words like rumors, gossip, pics, photos, wallpapers, might work well in your description.

One final advice. Don’t cram all the words you can think off in the sidebar. It’s useless and spammy. Use words people would actually associate with what you’re writing about.

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