On Page SEO

This is part 4 of our Building & Marketing a Niche Website series, and its about On Page SEO!

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation as Im sure you know if you are already reading this blog. On Page SEO is basically the changes you can make to your site to make more Search Engine & User friendly; so lets dive right in.

Titles

Titles are extremely important for many factors, firstly they are a key tag to tell search engines and users what a site or particular webpage is about. The key is to keeping these unique for all pages of your site and trying to keep them actually relevant to what the page is about so if you do rank for the term on search engines you are getting targetted traffic and not completely random traffic to your site (who wants that?). Keep it unique, short and sweet. Put your brand name in their on the homepage but I personally remove it for this blog on content pages.

Meta Keywords & Descriptions

These carry little importance compared to how they used too. Gone are the days where you ranked for whatever keywords were in your meta keywords. Although they are of little importance, they should be added as dont forget; descriptions are the content that searchers see when your website appears on the search results. Try to make the text interesting and inviting so that people click through from the search engines onto your website.

Linking Structure

Theres many reasons why its a good idea to have a good linking structure throughout your site. Firstly it helps the flow of PageRank (linklove) spread throughout your website. Secondly it allows pages of your site that may be ‘deeper’ in terms of levels than other pages to be found and spidered, therefore indexed and another potential traffic point for your website. The easiest way to link to all the pages on your site is to create a sitemap, if you have more than 100 links / pages on your site then try to have a couple of these and use them as ‘index’ pages.

301 Redirect / Robots.txt

Try not to have too many versions of the same page, such as a normal version and a print version. Its better to block of the one that you probably wouldnt want to rank (the print version I assume) by adding a rule to your robots.txt file so theres no duplicate content issues within your site. Next I would recommend re-directing the non-www version of your site to the www version. This is something I do with all my sites and all my clients as I truly believe it works well and helps links spread throughout the site better; dont forget that you can set your preferred version in Webmaster Central.

Have it finished

I hate seeing pages that have ‘under construction’ on them, imagine having a few of these pages then remember that they are all going to have the same content. Dont setup or ‘link’ to pages that arent finished, have little content or are under construction. This could be the same saying for having friendly-URL’s so instead of having /page1.htm you could have /on-page-seo.htm. This adds more keywords to the site and can tell both users and search engines what a page is about before they even visit it.

Get these things in place and you are on your way to having setup a well optimised website. What are you waiting for?

5 Comments / June 14th, 2007 / Marketing, SEO

Content Creation & Ideas

This is part 3 of our Building & Marketing a Niche Website series, and its about Content Creation & Ideas!

Content Creation

So then, first of all you need to know what type of content you are going to have and how you are going to get it:

Text / Articles

For articles or text in other forms such as an ebook then theres a few routes you can take, you can:

• Write it yourself, get maximum ROI and save money
• View existing articles / ebooks and re-write them
• Pay a Copywriter or Company to manage the task

All these options have their benefits and negatives. You could write it yourself but it could take time, research and more work but you are saving on money. Paying someone to do it saves these things but of course does cost so your budget will have to come into play.

Tools

The options to getting tools for your site are pretty similar to the way in which you could get articles for your website:

• Create them yourself from scratch, get out those old PHP books you have stashed away or use your already built skills
• Take code snippets and mash something together from what you can find on the web
• Hire somebody from the likes of DigitalPoint or ViperChill Forums to code the tool for you

If you really arent a coder and you know you dont have the skills to put it together, then dont waste your time trying; spend a little and get somebody to do a professional job.

Ideas

Everything on your site is content, whether its a game, a flash animation, some amazing article or a Windows Vista guide; its content. To get the most from your content or your writers its a good idea to have a unique edge or add your own little twist to set yourself apart from the competition.

There arent many sites out there offering vista guides so there isnt much competition in the first place; write them yourself or get an experienced vista user to create them, try to include screenshots to set yourself apart from the rest of the guides out there. The same goes if you are marketing an e-book. Try to other freebies that nobody else is offering or even something you have created yourself.

If you can get a unique idea in your industry, you’re onto a winner!

One Comment / June 12th, 2007 / Marketing

Website Hosting & Design

This is part 2 of our Building & Marketing a Niche Website series, and its about Website Hosting & Design!.

Website Hosting

If you are going to be serious about your website then you are going to need to be serious when picking a host. The thing I most look for in hosting is support, thats why for smaller sites I use Jortex and for dedicated servers I use someone like FDCServers. These are good hosts in my opinion, but that doesnt mean you should use them, when looking for a host consider the following:

• Community, if they have forums how active are they? The member number can sometimes show you an estimate of how many clients / customers they have
• Support, as stated this is a huge thing for me. If they have live chat on their site then even better (as long as its on). MSN communication is also a huge factor for me and one of the reasons I use Jortex
• On site Content - I hate sites like Namecheap where there knowledge base doesnt even work half the time or even a site that has a nice knowledgebase but nothing in it, whats the point?

If you know your stuff when it comes to hosting and servers already, you might not really need any support so just get a reliable host with good uptime.

Design

Again, I’m sorry to keep saying this throughout the series but it really does depend on the type of site that you are promoting. If you are promoting a site which is about gardening tools and where to buy them (affiliate-style) then you might want a landing page or a lovely greenery style website. If you are offering a site on vista guides you may have to hire a coder on some Webmaster Forums to be able to get a design similar to the operating system itself.

Of course you dong have to pay for a design, if you have any idea on editing html or just content on html based templates then you can do a google search for ‘Free CSS Templates’ and find tonnes of sites offering lots of lovely designs for free. You may need to keep the creator credit in-tact but apart from that do some tweaks to make it unique to your site, its free so why not?

One Comment / June 6th, 2007 / Marketing

Choosing the Niche & Registering the Domain

This is part 1 of our Building & Marketing a Niche Website series, and its about Choosing Your Niche and Registering the Domain!.

Choosing the Niche

Choosing a Niche isnt always easy, and you should choose a niche relative to what you have in mind for creating the niche website in the first place. Everything you will see in this serious can theoratically be outsourced so it doesnt necessarily have to be a niche that you are personally interested in. If you are doing it just to make a bit of money you may go for something like ‘mesothelioma‘ or if you are doing it for something you are interested in it may be about ‘Vista Guides‘ for the new Windows Vista platform. We are going to be basing this series around a virtual Vista Guides website and if it goes well we may run a series showing an actual site.

To really choose your niche you have to decide what you want to do with the site. If you are wanting to make some money then you may go for a high paying keyword niche with a lot of competition or a lower paying keyword niche with less competition. If you just want to do it all yourself and not outsource any work (it can be costly) then it may be best if you build a site around an interest. A niche site really can be on anything, but thats what it should be; a niche. General sites such as ‘chat forums’ or ‘myspace layouts’ sites while still having a niche are far away from the content based niche that I will be basing this series on so its up to you which niche you choose.

Registering the Domain

You may think this is the quick and easy part, but once again you have to think about your intentions for the site. If its to gain search engine rankings then you may try and get a keyword in the domain, if its going to be something you want to brand to the niche then you may try and think of something relevant but unique. Bare in mind that is easier said than done. For a good domain name provider I would recommend NameCheap as they have been great for me and offer free domain whoisguard with every .com.

For the purpose of pretending to build a site around vista guides I think I would register a domain like vista-guides.com (really original ;)) or guidevista.com (something unique but catchy).

Think of a domain for your niche, try to keep it related in some way even if you are going for something brandable.

One Comment / June 4th, 2007 / Marketing

Building & Marketing a Niche Website

This is the corner-stone post for a small series that is going to be running on this blog about how to go about Building and Marketing a niche website to bring in funding. We will look at what you can use to set it all up, how to go about building content, design and then SEO on-page finishing with building baclinks and traffic. These links will become live once the post has been published:

Part 1 - Choosing the Niche & Registering the Domain
Part 2 - Website Hosting & Design
Part 3 - Content Creation & Ideas
Part 4 - On Page SEO
Part 5 - Building Traffic
Part 6 - Building Links
Part 7 - Flipping & Monetisation

Heres to our first real series on the site, I hope you enjoy :).

3 Comments / June 1st, 2007 / Marketing