A flagship according to Wikipedia in common language refers to the most important or leading member of a group. In Naval terms it’s the lead ship in a fleet of vessels, often known to be the largest, fastest, newest, and most heavily armed or, for publicity purposes, the best known.

In SEO it essentially means the same thing. It’s a lead page or blog post that acts as the “biggest and baddest” and gathers all of the SEO value (links, tweets etc.) and distributes that SEO value to all of your posts that relate to it. Let me break it down for you.

The SEO Flagship Concept

Step 1: Write Some Blog Posts

Write various individual blog posts around a certain subject. So for example over the next couple of weeks you may want to write various blog posts about Justin Bieber (Oh wow I hope you don’t really do this). While doing so you will want to keep in mind some sort of logic that will allow you to gather these into one place later on.

Step 2: Create the Flagship

Over time collect and gather these blog posts into one place. This “place” will be a new page or blog post that could be one of several things…

• An Ebook
• A Free Guide
• Table of Contents
• A “What Might Have Missed” type of blog post etc.

Get the idea? Bloggers like Darren Rowse of Problogger.net and Brian Clark of CopyBlogger.com do this quite often. Here’s an example on CopyBlogger called Copywriter 101. You will notice that it’s a compilation of posts on that 1 subject collected over time.

Step 3: Build Links

Build Links and Social Bookmarks to your new Flagship Page for specific targeted key phrases. Yes link building still plays an important role in SEO. And yes you should still do it. But just like all things on the web there is a good way and an evil way of doing this. Build links to your new Flagship page the right way. Here are a few ideas…

• Submit to Digg, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Reddit and other Social Bookmarking sites
• Leave some comments on Forums relating to your content
• Answer some questions on Yahoo! Answers relating to your content
• Leave some comments on some blogs relating to your content
• Collaborate with other Bloggers to write commentary on what you have written

For more ideas on great way to build high quality long lasting links to your Flagship pages, here is an article from SeoBook.com on 101 Ways to Build Link Popularity.

Step 4: Passing Link Juice

The links within your Flagship page will pass “link juice” to each of your individual blog posts. Now instead of having to link building for each individual blog post that you write, you can consolidate your link building efforts to just your Flagship page(s) and expect those link building efforts to pass on to your automatically for you simply through internal site linking.

Why You Want To Do This

This isn’t really a new concept. Instead of being restricted to targeting just a few major key phrases to your homepage, you can greatly expand your reach by creating these flagship pages and targeting different sets of major key phrases.

Don’t forget however that the most important factor in all of this is the quality of your content. If you are just going to write CRAP and not put any effort into your writing then forget everything I just told you because it won’t work.

On the flip side if you are willing to invest time studying, brainstorming, writing, and creating your content than this Flagship Link Building Concept is going to work wonders for you and help you expand your Organic Search Engine reach.

For similar SEO tips check out my Free SEO Report. It’s a free download I call the SEO Blackbook.