The first thing you want to do is create a plan for your website.
Build Up Your Knowledge!
Okay, so you've already done some research and picked out a good niche. So how are you going to create a site you know nothing about? The low cost approach is doing the research yourself. You don't have to go back to school for this. Check out online encyclopedias and related sites. Go to your local library and check out a few books on the niche.
Make sure that the information you pick is valid and acceptable. Whether you're reviewing websites or books, look at online reviews to see how others perceive the info. If you've picked out a book that has a lot of bad reviews, what do you think people would say about a website based off of that book?
Think about this whole process as an extended book report. Instead of talking about 1 book, you're combining all of the knowledge you've learned and reporting on it.
Keyword Selection -- The Planning Stage
After using Wordtracker, you should have hundreds of keywords. Will you use all of them? Most likely not. When I build a site, I'm looking at building at least 200 pages. It doesn't have to be all at once and shouldn't. You should continuously add content over time.
When I first started doing content sites, I felt kind of funny about the whole concept of typing tons of content. All the way up through college, I always avoided classes that focussed on writing, history, and literature. I was the technical type and always selected classes like engineering and physics.
Don't let writing or language skills intimidate you. The more you write, the more you'll improve. Whether if it's writing content for your site, or on somebody elses forum, practice makes perfect!
So what's your deadline? Let's say 6 months. Does a 200 page website seem like a big goal? Well there's 365 days in a year. In 6 months, there's close to 182 days. If you do 1-2 articles a day, you'll have it completed in 6 months.
Breaking down big goals into smaller steps makes things less overwhelming.
What Should You Write About?
I usually write articles about highly searched for topics first to create a foundation for my site. I then write articles using less searched for keywords that are relevant and support my foundation.
Look at your keyword list and select 200 keywords and ones that relate to it. You can have a primary keyword, and have 2-3 other ones that would relate to that article. Choose between 5-20 main topics from your list that are relative.
For your main topics, mostly likely they'll all be high competition. You might have millions of competitors for these pages. However, there are still main keywords that are similar to others that have lesser competition. For example, "term life quotations" could have less competition than "term life quotes".
For article pages, I typically look for keywords that have less than 10000 competitors.
Designing and Publishing Your Site
To publish your website, you're going to need some tools.
First, you'll need a tool to create your webpages. I use to use Microsoft Frontpage
. Some other great tools are Macromedia Dreamweaver and Macromedia Flash (for great animations).
While these programs are all great, they can slow down production of your content sites. One of the problems that I faced is high memory consumption (compared to what I'm using now). Besides that, setting up information within templates was timely too. I would only use these programs for sites with irregular templates, or if you just like using their interface. Since my content sites are mostly made from text (and some images), I don't need any of the other features offered from these popular web design softwares.
Free Website Software
If you don't want to spend money on the premiere functionality of design or content publishing software, you can try some free programs.
If you want a simple and easy to use interface, download Mozilla. The full blown Mozilla suite comes with an html editor. For those of you that don't know about Mozilla, it's a great alternative to Internet Explorer. (I use Opera, but it doesn't have an html editor).
If you feel comfortable installing program scripts on your server, you can try a CMS (Content Management System). Free server based CMS's worth considering are Limbo CMS (MySQL can be used, but is not required) or Nukedit if your server is running Windows IIS.
If you're really tech savvy, check out HTML Kit. It's highly customizable and it's great if you like working with html code.
You'll most likely need an FTP program. This will allow you to transfer your files from your computer onto the remote host. I use a free program called FileZilla. You can search through CNET's download.com for more programs.
Another type of software I'd recommend is blogging software. You can make your site more personal by using one. Popular ones are Wordpress, Blogger, Moveable Type and Pivot. This site was built using Blogger. Blogger is free (no paid hosting required). Both Wordpress and Moveable Type are hosted on your server with a MySQL database. Pivot is also hosted on your server, but doesn't require a database since it uses an internal flatfile database system.
You can review "Part 3" of this series to see why you should or should not use a free hosted site.
I personally use Pivot. Not because it's the best, but mostly because it doesn't rely on a external database, like MySQL, and it does what I need it to. It's highly customizable and has plenty useful of features.
Another advantage to using blog software is RSS feeds. You can set up the program so that it will automatically submit each article to a directory service. This will bring in more traffic to your site.
Also, since the software is hosted on the site, you can edit your websites using any computer in the world with internet service.
Each one of these blog softwares have a support community. If you're not so technical, setting up a blog on your host can be difficult at first. So if you need information on installation or other support issues, check out their respective support sites.
Important Note: Getting Your Site Indexed By Search Engines
Have you ever seen advertisements for submitting your site to search engines? My take on all this is that you should never submit your URL to a search engine. In order to get your site indexed, post some useful content with your link on a site or directory with a high page rank.
The benefit of not submitting to a search engine is that if a search engine finds your link on a relevant site, your site can possibly rank higher. It's kind of like a recommendation from another site.
You can use forums, articles, or other promotional media...just don't use SPAM. Your reputation is on the line, so make sure that all your posts are done with good taste.
If you don't know what page rank is, download the Google toolbar. Go to options and enable 'PageRank Display'. Every site you go to will have a 0-10 PageRank. The higher, the better.
I'll usually target sites with at least a rank of 4.
You'll also want to look for sites that are relevant to your website. I would not link my financial website to a site on plasma TV's.
Build Up Your Knowledge!
Okay, so you've already done some research and picked out a good niche. So how are you going to create a site you know nothing about? The low cost approach is doing the research yourself. You don't have to go back to school for this. Check out online encyclopedias and related sites. Go to your local library and check out a few books on the niche.
Make sure that the information you pick is valid and acceptable. Whether you're reviewing websites or books, look at online reviews to see how others perceive the info. If you've picked out a book that has a lot of bad reviews, what do you think people would say about a website based off of that book?
Think about this whole process as an extended book report. Instead of talking about 1 book, you're combining all of the knowledge you've learned and reporting on it.
Keyword Selection -- The Planning Stage
After using Wordtracker, you should have hundreds of keywords. Will you use all of them? Most likely not. When I build a site, I'm looking at building at least 200 pages. It doesn't have to be all at once and shouldn't. You should continuously add content over time.
When I first started doing content sites, I felt kind of funny about the whole concept of typing tons of content. All the way up through college, I always avoided classes that focussed on writing, history, and literature. I was the technical type and always selected classes like engineering and physics.
Don't let writing or language skills intimidate you. The more you write, the more you'll improve. Whether if it's writing content for your site, or on somebody elses forum, practice makes perfect!
So what's your deadline? Let's say 6 months. Does a 200 page website seem like a big goal? Well there's 365 days in a year. In 6 months, there's close to 182 days. If you do 1-2 articles a day, you'll have it completed in 6 months.
Breaking down big goals into smaller steps makes things less overwhelming.
What Should You Write About?
I usually write articles about highly searched for topics first to create a foundation for my site. I then write articles using less searched for keywords that are relevant and support my foundation.
Look at your keyword list and select 200 keywords and ones that relate to it. You can have a primary keyword, and have 2-3 other ones that would relate to that article. Choose between 5-20 main topics from your list that are relative.
For your main topics, mostly likely they'll all be high competition. You might have millions of competitors for these pages. However, there are still main keywords that are similar to others that have lesser competition. For example, "term life quotations" could have less competition than "term life quotes".
For article pages, I typically look for keywords that have less than 10000 competitors.
Designing and Publishing Your Site
To publish your website, you're going to need some tools.
First, you'll need a tool to create your webpages. I use to use Microsoft Frontpage
. Some other great tools are Macromedia Dreamweaver and Macromedia Flash (for great animations).While these programs are all great, they can slow down production of your content sites. One of the problems that I faced is high memory consumption (compared to what I'm using now). Besides that, setting up information within templates was timely too. I would only use these programs for sites with irregular templates, or if you just like using their interface. Since my content sites are mostly made from text (and some images), I don't need any of the other features offered from these popular web design softwares.
Free Website Software
If you don't want to spend money on the premiere functionality of design or content publishing software, you can try some free programs.
If you want a simple and easy to use interface, download Mozilla. The full blown Mozilla suite comes with an html editor. For those of you that don't know about Mozilla, it's a great alternative to Internet Explorer. (I use Opera, but it doesn't have an html editor).
If you feel comfortable installing program scripts on your server, you can try a CMS (Content Management System). Free server based CMS's worth considering are Limbo CMS (MySQL can be used, but is not required) or Nukedit if your server is running Windows IIS.
If you're really tech savvy, check out HTML Kit. It's highly customizable and it's great if you like working with html code.
You'll most likely need an FTP program. This will allow you to transfer your files from your computer onto the remote host. I use a free program called FileZilla. You can search through CNET's download.com for more programs.
Another type of software I'd recommend is blogging software. You can make your site more personal by using one. Popular ones are Wordpress, Blogger, Moveable Type and Pivot. This site was built using Blogger. Blogger is free (no paid hosting required). Both Wordpress and Moveable Type are hosted on your server with a MySQL database. Pivot is also hosted on your server, but doesn't require a database since it uses an internal flatfile database system.
You can review "Part 3" of this series to see why you should or should not use a free hosted site.
I personally use Pivot. Not because it's the best, but mostly because it doesn't rely on a external database, like MySQL, and it does what I need it to. It's highly customizable and has plenty useful of features.
Another advantage to using blog software is RSS feeds. You can set up the program so that it will automatically submit each article to a directory service. This will bring in more traffic to your site.
Also, since the software is hosted on the site, you can edit your websites using any computer in the world with internet service.
Each one of these blog softwares have a support community. If you're not so technical, setting up a blog on your host can be difficult at first. So if you need information on installation or other support issues, check out their respective support sites.
Important Note: Getting Your Site Indexed By Search Engines
Have you ever seen advertisements for submitting your site to search engines? My take on all this is that you should never submit your URL to a search engine. In order to get your site indexed, post some useful content with your link on a site or directory with a high page rank.
The benefit of not submitting to a search engine is that if a search engine finds your link on a relevant site, your site can possibly rank higher. It's kind of like a recommendation from another site.
You can use forums, articles, or other promotional media...just don't use SPAM. Your reputation is on the line, so make sure that all your posts are done with good taste.
If you don't know what page rank is, download the Google toolbar. Go to options and enable 'PageRank Display'. Every site you go to will have a 0-10 PageRank. The higher, the better.
I'll usually target sites with at least a rank of 4.
You'll also want to look for sites that are relevant to your website. I would not link my financial website to a site on plasma TV's.
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