Whitehat VRE Empire: Building The First Site
If you’ve been following along, you know it’s time for us to build the first site in our VRE empire. You need to have chosen a topic that interests you and has some (but not necessarily much) commercial viability.
The topic I’ve chosen for my first site is adult braces. Like many people, I had braces when I was a teenager. But as I grew older, my teeth started crowding. What they know now is that people who have braces need to continue to wear retainers at night for the rest of their life in order to avoid problems with moving teeth. So people like me who had braces when they were younger suddenly discover they need braces again in their thirties or forties!
As you can imagine, I wasn’t thrilled to discover I needed braces again. I even put it off for a couple of years. But it was getting to the point where I needed to do something about it or lose a tooth that was being crowded out.
Rather than use traditional metal braces, my orthodontist offered me the option of using so-called “invisible” braces from a company called Invisalign. Made of transparent plastic, they aren’t permanent and can be taken off to eat and drink. They can’t make the same kinds of changes that metal braces can, but they were good enough to fix my basic problem of tooth crowding. So that’s what I went for. I’m almost done the course of treatment now, so I thought it would make a good topic for a site.
What follows is a long and detailed explanation of how I take this basic idea and transform it into an AdSense site. I hope you find the details useful.
The Domain
I’ve had the idea for this site almost since I started the treatment, so I actually reserved a domain name a while back in anticipation. The domain I’m using is bracesagain.com. Notice that I’ve got a relevant keyword (”braces”) at the start of the domain. That alone should ensure I get relevant ads on the site. The domain also gives the visitor a good idea of what the site is about.
This step is hard, though. It took me a while to find something suitable. Stay away from trademarks if at all possible, use generic terms. I generally start by generating a list of keywords with the AdWords keyword tool and use GoDaddy’s bulk registration facility to see if any of them are available as .com domains. (See Find Keyword-Rich Domain Names In 3 Easy Steps for details on how to do this, except you only need steps 1 and 3 — you can skip step 2 because the GoDaddy bulk domain registration tool automatically strips out spaces.)
Once you’ve found your domain, register it and adjust its nameserver settings to point it to your hosting service. Then go over to your hosting service and create an account for the new domain. I’m not going to show you how to do this, it depends on which domain registrar and hosting service you’re using. It should be fairly straightforward.
The .htaccess and robot.txt Files
The first thing I do after setting up hosting is create the .htaccess and robots.txt files for my site. Let’s start with the latter, since it’s simpler.
The robots.txt file controls which parts of your site the search engines are allowed to crawl. For a simple site like ours, you normally have nothing to block them from. You could in fact not bother with the robots.txt file since the default is to “crawl all pages” if the file is missing. But there’s a good reason to create a robots.txt: sitemap discovery.
One of the things we’re going to do is create an “XML sitemap” for our site. This is a special file that search engines can examine to find the pages on our site. See Sitemaps.org for details on how XML sitemaps work. In particular, take a look at Specifying the Sitemap location in your robots.txt file, which explains why we’re creating a robots.txt file: to specify the location of our sitemap.
With your favorite text editor, create a file called robots.txt that contains the following four lines:
User-agent: * Disallow: Sitemap: http://www.bracesagain.com/sitemap.xml
You’ll need to adjust the URL of the sitemap, of course. Place this file in the root folder of your website using your favorite FTP program. (Again, I’m not going through the details of how to do that, you can find lots of help for this on the web.)
Next, we create our .htaccess file. The main purpose of this file is set the “canonical name” of our website. Do you want it known as “bracesagain.com” or “www.bracesagain.com”? Either way, there are commands you can place in the .htaccess to redirect visitors to the “correct” form of the website domain. You’ll find the detailed instructions in my previous post The AdSense-Ready WordPress Blog. I’m going to use “www.bracesagain.com” as the base address for my website, like most sites out there.
However, I also need the .htaccess file for another purpose. I’m going to be using my PLRSiteBuilder software to build the site, but I want to use nice “.html” extensions on my files instead of “.php”. But the “.html” files still have to be processed as if they ended in “.php”, because they’ll have PHP commands in them. So I need to tell the system to do just that using an “AddType” command. (This is all purely cosmetic, I just like to see “.html” used as the extension. My quirk.) I also want to add a mapping so that references for “sitemap.xml” actually get handled by “sitemap.php”.
So the final .htaccess file for my site looks like this:
RemoveHandler .html
AddType application/x-httpd-php4 .html
Options -Indexes
Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^bracesagain.(.*)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.bracesagain.com/$1 [qsappend,R=301,L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} sitemap.xml
RewriteRule . /sitemap.xml [L]
Details of what goes into the file may vary, depending on how your hosting service works. If you don’t want to do the .html-to-.php mapping, leave out the first two lines. Or use your hosting service’s control panel to do the mapping. Whatever works for you!
Again, this file goes into the main website folder alongside the robots.txt file.
Everything I’ve described so far is routine setup stuff. You’ll do it every time to create a new site, varying the details according to the site. After you do it a couple of times it will become routine. (Note that if you’re building a WordPress site there are plugins available to do this stuff for you.)
The Site Skeleton
Now we’re ready to start on the site proper. Start PLRSiteBuilder and start the Site Design Wizard, as shown below. (The screenshots shown here can be clicked on to see them full size.)
We’re creating an “article/informational” site, of course. Now enter in basic information about the site: the name, the description, the domain, the main keyword:
Next we define the folders we’ll use for this site. One folder is the “input” or “content” folder, the other is the “output” for “site” folder. I like to put them under a single root folder for the site:
Finally, decide if you want to show live AdSense ads right away. Normally, I recommend you don’t turn on the ads until you have some real content on the site, for reasons I’ve explained before:
The wizard finishes and the skeleton site is now generated, ready for uploading:
Except that I want to make a few tweaks before doing any uploading, so back on the main property page for the project I go to the Site tab and specify that I want to use .html as the file extension:
Moving to the Folders tag, I specify a “copy folder” for my project. The site generated into the output folder will also be copied here. I use this to test out the site locally using a copy of XAMPP, a standalone bundled version of Apache and PHP — the site gets copied directly into the folder where XAMPP looks for web pages to display:
Now I press Generate the Site to regenerate the site. I test it out locally to make sure it’s OK, then upload it to my hosting account using FileZilla, the free FTP client I like to use. Here’s what the site looks like:
There’s no content, so it doesn’t look like much. But click on the links and you’ll see it has the requisite pieces, such as an “about” page, a privacy policy, a sitemap (both kinds — the home page is the human-readable one, but you can’t see that yet because there is no content yet), and even an RSS feed (under http://www.bracesagain.com/feed/).
Don’t Waste Your Time
Did you notice that I haven’t really spent any time tweaking the way the site looks? There are two reasons for this. First, it’s hard to do without any real content — you really need some paragraphs of text to see how things flow across the different pages. Second, you can waste a lot of time making the site look perfect. I know, I’ve done it myself… spent literally hours trying to make a site look “just right”…
My advice to you is to just get the site looking “OK” and work on fleshing out the content before you spend too much time on making it pretty. This applies to any site building tool you use, including WordPress. You can spend a LOT of time looking for the “right” theme to use for your WordPress site… or you grab a standard AdSense-ready theme and move on!
Remember, the key is to get the sites up and running as quickly as you can. Once you do it a few times, the setup process will become second nature, leaving you to concentrate on the content.
I think I’ll stop here for now, this is a pretty long post. We have our skeletal site up, now it’s time to put in some content, which is what we’ll do next time.
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Tags
AdSense, .htaccess, adult braces, PLRSiteBuilder, robots.txt, VRE, vritual real estate, whitehat
Comments
9 Responses to “Whitehat VRE Empire: Building The First Site”
[...] Whitehat VRE Empire: Building The First Site [...]
It’s always best as you said to wait for traffic to come before worrying too much about appearance. I have found this to always be useful for any site I have ever worked on/built. Thanks for the info!
Lance
I have not heard of the PLRSitebuilder software, I’ll follow your links in a minute and check it out. Looks like a good way to make money online with adsense. I’m very familiar with building info sites and using Wordpress, so this new way of doing it is very interesting. I agree, when I put up a new site I take care of the Privacy Page 1st, with Google’s new requirements for Adsense I just want to make sure I’m compliant. And I’ve heard (rumor) that if you do have the “about”, “privacy”, and “contact” pages you stand a better chance of having your site indexed. It’s just a good practice. Thanks for the well written post – a lot of work went into it!
Thanks for this Article, i´ll need to look into the PLRSitebuilder as it seems easy and fast.
- Tony
The comment about .html extensions has me thinking… I always rewrite all my .html and .php extensions away to nothing (or /), but does anyone have data that supports .html being better for SEO or visitor “trust” or anything else?
Shawn, I don’t think it really matters. I like removing the .php because then it’s not so obvious that PHP is being used on the site, i.e. less chance crackers will try to crack the site.
Thanks for the outline. I’m a big fan of Wordpress back-ends, but this seems like a very good alternative.
You also make an excellent point about content — it seems a lot of web development pushes towards flashy designs/things that grab attention, while ignoring the most important part of it all … the information!
I’d almost prefer a simple black and white site with bullet points as opposed to a fully designed one, so long as the info is what I’m looking for.
I’m very familiar with building info sites and using Wordpress, so this new way of doing it is very interesting. I agree, when I put up a new site I take care of the Privacy Page 1st, with Google’s new requirements for Adsense I just want to make sure I’m compliant. And I’ve heard (rumor) that if you do have the “aboutâ€, “privacyâ€, and “contact†pages you stand a better chance of having your site indexed. It’s just a good practice. Thanks for the well written post – a lot of work went into it!
Good point about focusing on writing good content instead making the site look good. While it’s important to have both, it really is about providing people with valuable information.
Coincidentally, I also had Invisalign, and I read tons of blogs about other people who used it. I’m sure your site will get lots of visitors!