Step Two: SEO Domain Selection, Best Hosting, Adsense Web Design and SEO Content – Build Your Site From Start to Finish

The first time it will take you a bit longer but over time, 5-10 minutes is all you need to register a domain, host it, and get word press installed on it.

Once you’ve done your market research and you know your keywords, or the general niche your website will be in, it’s time to choose a domain name.

I made a video at the start of each section explaining the content. Either watch the video or read the article below depending on your preference!

Domain Selection


The best registrar by far is NameCheap.com. I don’t want to hear about anything else. They never bother you about anything, they are competitive with less than $10 domain names and they give you private registration (WHOIS GUARD) for free which you should enable as soon as you buy your domain. It keeps Google and other people who would like to spy on all your websites from knowing who owns your domain with a WHOIS lookup tool like http://whois.domaintools.com/.

If you are looking for a domain that will help you in search engine optimization (rankings in Google) you should know that the best domain you can have is an Exact Match Keyword. Example, if you found out using a keyword tool searching tool that the keyword [alfredo sauce recipe] has 49000 Exact Match searches per month, and that you want to use this keyword, the exact match domain (EMD) would be alfredosaucerecipe.com, alfredosaucerecipe.net or alfredosaucerecipe.org.

No dashes. No numbers. No .info or other shitty domain extensions. It has to be exactly the keyword, otherwise it will not get any boost from Google.

Unfortunately, it is almost impossible to buy a domain name with good Exact search volume because other internet marketers have bought all of them. If you decide to use a niche in another language than English, which I highly recommend, exact match domains will be available for decent keywords. Don’t worry if it is not available, it will rank normally, 90% of my income from SEO comes from keywords that ARE NOT in my domain. If the EMD is available you have two choices. Either you choose an Exact Match Keyword domain that has a bad volume but that also contains your main keyword. Example: I could choose the keyword [fettuccine alfredo sauce recipe] and buy the domain name fettuccinealfredosaucerecipe.org. It only has 1000 Exact match volume per month but it will rank very easily for the Exact Match Keyword, while keeping the general name of the niche inside.

However, if you are going for a “passion website” or something that you predict will have more then 5 pages/posts or so, I would go with a more brand able name such as the one we chose for this blog (Thelinkback, we did not go for howtomakemoneyonlinerightnow.com which would be ugly/spammy).

trademark domain namesCaution: Do not use Trademarks inside of domain names. It is against Adsense ToS and also illegal. You can be sure that once your domain starts ranking, the Trademark company in question will contact your registrar and your registrar will have to transfer the domain to them. Also, I have seen several occurrences of people that had trademark domains in their Adsense account and they had all their websites (even the legit ones) removed from Google’s index forever, and their account banned.

Note: So what if you already have a website and it doesn’t contain the Exact Match Keyword in it? Are you fucked and need to change domain? The answer is no, you should keep your old domain. In the end, age is more important than having your keyword in the domain name. As your site and your pages get older, they get more power and authority in Google’s eyes.

In the end, if you cannot find an Exact Match Keyword domain that is worth it, it doesn’t really matter if your niche is good. You should use something such as alfredosaucerecipeguide.com, alfredosaucerecipeinfo.com, alfredosaucerecipeblog.com, davesalfredosaucerecipe.com, etc. When doing this, find a .com, they are more brandable.

Hosting


hostgatorThe best hosting company is hostgator.com. Their least expensive package is the hatching plan but that only allows you to use them for ONE DOMAIN. So, you should definitely go for a Baby plan which offers unlimited domains/bandwith etc.

Use the coupon PASSINCOMESEO to get $9 off your first month, basically making it free. Or If you want to pay on a longer period such as on a semi annual basis or more you can use GET25REBATE to get 25% off the whole thing.

I’ve been using them for years and never had any problem. The 24/7 support line even helps you install scripts, troubleshoot problems with your website, recover from hacking attempts etc. They are amazing. Both of us use them for all our main websites.

Hostgator costs ~$8 per month. You will have a cpanel and can add as many addon domains, subdomains, users and databases as you want. They also do automatic backups of your sites every week. You can’t really beat that and still have 24/7 support and a trusted company to back it up. I had my websites hacked twice in the past and hostgator customer support was always really quick in setting them back up. As a side note, after your first domain is hosted, future domains you register will be setup under an “addons domain”, here is a link to the guide, it’s VERY simple once you do it once.

Instructions on how to Set up Your Site for Beginners

  1. Once you paid for your hosting, they should send you your server information by email pretty quickly. You will need to find in that email what your DNS (Domain Name Server) is.
  2. Log into NameCheap.com and go to Manage Domain, click on your domain, then on the left click on Transfer DNS to Webhost. Choose “Use custom DNS” and enter your 2 DNS in the fields. For Hostgator, these should be something like  ns1234.hostgator.com and ns1235.hostgator.com. This step links your domain to your hosting account. It can take up to 48 hours to take effect, but it’s usually almost instant since namecheap is very quick.
  3. Go to http://yourdomain.com/cpanel to access your cpanel. If the DNS hasn’t propagated yet, look at your hosting information email, they provide you with a link to your cpanel that doesn’t require your DNS to be set up.
  4. Optional: If you are using another domain name than the original one you registered the hosting with, from the cpanel home page, you will need to go to “Addon Domain” and add the domain. Subdomains and passwords are irrelevant, put anything.
  5. From the cpanel home page, go to Fantastico Deluxe, click on WordPress in the left sidebar, then New Installation, choose your domain and follow the rest of the instructions. Titles and options can be edited later, but put in your keyword as the Title and your slogan or whatever as the description.

 

WordPress Configuration

The video is a bit long for this section, if you have already used wordpress just read the text information so you can see the specific plugins I use. For others, you might want to watch the video to have a better feel to how things work inside wordpress.

  1. Go to http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin to access your WordPress admin panel. Go to Setting->Privacy and put it to be viewable by Search Engines if it’s not already like that by default. Go to Settings->Permalinks and change the value to Custom and put %postname% in the field.
  2. Go to Plugins->Add Plugins. Make a search, install and activate the following plugins:
    1. SEO Ultimate (Helps with proper SEO of your website, don’t worry too much about all the different features for now)
    2. Wp-insert if you want some automation in inserting your advertisement.
    3. Contact Form 7 (All websites need a contact us form.)
    4. Enable Akismet, it should already be installed. This will help stop comment spam.
    5. Google XML Sitemap (Creates a sitemap of your website and sends it to Google and other search engines periodically.)
    6. Easy Privacy Policy (Creates a Privacy Policy page, needed for adsense)
    7. PuSHPress Just active it, it helps get your stuff indexed faster.
    8. Statpress for stat tracking, or use google analytics. I usually use statpress first and once I see good traffic I use google analytics (it can take a few minutes to setup, I only do it once there is actual traffic to analyze!)
    9. Wp-Smushit (automatically reduces your image’s size, faster load times)

That’s it. Your website is set up!

Website Design – Making Your Own WordPress Themes With Artisteer

Don’t use a free theme. They are always badly optimized for Adsense, are too generic or look plain bad, and 1000s of other retards use them. Free themes can also contain hidden spam links or bogus code that will make you drop in rankings. Happened to us before. I just think it’s not worth it, by the way, this especially includes pirated themes.

A lot of pirated themes you find “for free” are actually hacked by the one distributing them to have hidden backlinks to his website, hence why he went to the effort of buying the theme, hacking it and sharing it with everyone “for free”.

If you plan on making more then one website, you’re going to download a program called Artisteer (the Home and Academic version is the one I own and it works just fine). It cost $50 for life. Consider it an investment. It will improve your Adsense clickthrough rate (CTR) so much that you will make your money back as soon as you get some traffic to your site. You will be making a lot of themes and adjustments over the next months and years so get used to it.

Your first theme should take an hour to create. The second one will take 20 minutes or less.

There are four things your theme needs in order to have a good Adsense CTR:

1. White background for the posts and pages (This area is described as “Content” in Artisteer).
2. Font to Arial and font color to #444444 for posts and pages.
3. Link colors to #000080 (dark blue) in posts and pages.

The rest is up to you. Make it look as nice and legit as possible. Professionalism and relevancy is the key. You now have your own unique high CTR Adsense WordPress theme that you can tweak as needed in the future.

Money

You probably will start by using Adsense to make money. Why? Because in the first few weeks or months, when you’re only making a few dollars a day and getting a  few hundred visits a day to your website, it’s not gonna be worth it to research and test affiliate products. Let alone create your own product. Some websites will never have enough targeted traffic to actually make it worth it to take off Adsense and put affiliate products. Don’t worry, you can make 1000s of dollars a day with Adsense, and still have a very useful and legit website. Think Ezinearticles.com, About.com, Livestrong.com, etc.

Adsense instructions to make it convert well:

Your Adsense block in the post or page, either using a <div style=”float:left”>ADSENSE CODE</div> (float integrates the content besides the ad) or using a backspace without the content integrated besides the ad. Put one at the top and one at the bottom after the article. The best converter blocks are the biggest squares and the widest rectangles. Put title color to #000080, text to #444444 and url to #c3c3c3. Use the previously mentioned Wp-insert wordpress plugin to insert Adsense inside posts automatically. If you don’t have an Adsense account yet, wait until your design is finished and you are getting 30+ daily visitors before applying.

Caution: Do not fall into the trap of making tons of shitty looking websites like some Internet Marketing gurus recommend. Adsense accounts are manually reviewed every once in a while and people get banned all the time. Don’t be one of them. 5 page websites are OK, 30+ 5 page websites are NOT ok. You can have a few mixed with some big ones but just making small websites will push you towards a google Adsense ban. It’s the same amount of effort to make a shitty website as it is to make a good one. Make it good one. Keep it forever.

Creating Content Relevant to Your Keywords

First off, you want to make sure you have an About and Contact page. Also, since you will use Adsense to monetize your site  in the beginning, you will want to add a Privacy Policy page. The plugin Easy Privacy Policy does it for you.

I don’t write articles anymore but I did when I started. If you want to get writers, I recommend you go on Odesk and find some outsources to write for you. If you enjoy your topic and want to write, or if you are creating your own market, feel free to write. High quality content will be rewarded in the future with free backlinks from real people, returning visitors and viral traffic, but good content is, well, good enough for the most part or while testing multiple niches and seeing which ones has the most potential for you to put more of your time in.

You want to make sure the main keyword you are targeting is in the title and URL of your post. You also want it to be in the body of your post a few times. Some people go crazy over keyword density but the truth is I had plenty of keywords rank #1 with a density of only 1% (basically once in the title, maybe twice in the post). If you are targeting other keywords that are similar to the main one in this post, make sure to mention them 1-2 times somewhere in the body of your article.

When possible, link to other articles from your website that are relevant to the article you are currently writing. Link to them using the anchor text you want that page to rank for. For example, in our previous page in our guide, we wanted to rank for SEO keyword research. “SEO keyword research” is our anchor text.

Article length should be anywhere from ~250 to 1000, we usually have articles of around 400-500 words.

Now that your content is posted, time to use a backlinking strategy.

All in One Adsense and YPN!

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