At this point we’ve created the skeleton for the first site in our whitehat virtual real estate empire. Now comes the hard part — adding some real content!
Simple Stuff First
When I deploy a new site, I like to flesh out the simple stuff first, including:
- the home page;
- the about/contact page;
- the privacy policy; and
- common page elements.
I do these things first for a couple of reasons. First, it’s easy to forget to do them — witness how many default “about” pages for WordPress blogs you can find by doing a simple search for “This is an example of a WordPress page” (over 1 million!).
Second, it gets you thinking about the site: What kind of contact information do you expose? Do you need a disclaimer? What’s the site about? What kind of copyright message do you want? What will appear on the home page?
Also, they’re easy edits to do and you feel like you’ve accomplished something after doing them!
The privacy policy page is pretty much boilerplate code. The tool I’m using generated an AdSense-compliant policy automatically for me. If you use a different tool, you can model your privacy policy on this one. (If you are creating a WordPress blog, use my free Privacy Policy for WordPress plugin to do it.)
The about/contact page requires some thought. If you put an email address there, expect to be spammed — you should definitely create a separate email address for it that you can forward elsewhere. You probably don’t want to put a physical address and phone number on your site, even if it’s exposed in the domain registration. Some kind of contact form is a good idea.
The home page probably requires the most work. On sites I generate with PLRSiteBuilder, the home page is basically just an introductory paragraph or two and a list of the articles on the site. This lets it do double-duty as the human-readable sitemap and makes sure that all the pages are easily crawlable by the search engines. But you may choose to do it differently and put the article list somewhere else entirely. You may or may not want to show AdSense ads on the home page — I don’t think dropping the ads from the home page will hurt you much and it may make the page look better to anyone who happens to land on it instead of on one of the article pages.
Don’t spend too much time on this stuff, though. You can always change it later. You want to quickly get to the meat of the site.
Writing the Content
Creating the content for your first site will take more time than setting up the site itself. That said, if you chose the right topic it shouldn’t be that hard. It’s much harder when you don’t know anything about the topic you’re writing about!
You’ll want to start with at least five to ten pages of content. The more, the better. Each page should be a different subtopic and focus on a different keyword phrase. One technique that works well is to do what I discussed in Profitable AdSense Article Marketing and use the AdWords keyword tool to generate a list of related keywords and split them into two sets, the “traffic set” and the “money set”, based on their relative cost-per-click values. The “money set” becomes the nucleus for your content.
(Note: Again, I have to remind everyone that the CPC numbers you see with the AdWords keyword tool do not directly reflect the actual CPC numbers you’ll see in AdSense. See The Problems With High-Paying Keyword Lists for a detailed discussion why. Since we don’t have AdSense keyword data, we have to rely on the AdWords numbers and assume that advertisers who pay more for search placement will also pay more — substantially less, but still more — for placement on quality AdSense sites.)
Let’s try this with the “adult braces” topic. Using the keyword tool, I see that the CPC range for these keywords ranges from $0.05 to about $13 for exact searches, with most clustered in the $2-$4 range. Here’s a small sample:
From this list I’m going to pick some likely phrases on which to base my content. These ones seem particularly apt to what the site’s about:
- adult braces or braces for adults (vary their use)
- lingual braces (a type of brace)
- invisible braces or clear braces (another type of brace)
- cost of braces (sure to be something they’re wondering about!)
- removable braces (definitely of interest to adults)
- types of braces (good for an overview)
- ceramic braces (a type of brace)
- metal braces (a type of brace)
- dental insurance (goes well with “cost of braces”)
- teeth straightening or straighten teeth (why do you need braces?)
- orthodontic retainer (something you wear after the braces are done)
- fast braces (how quickly can braces work?)
- orthodontist (more about the special type of dentist)
Now transform those keywords into page titles:
- Do You Need Adult Braces?
- Lingual Braces
- Invisible Braces
- The Cost of Braces
- The Pros and Cons of Removable Braces
- Common Types of Braces
- Ceramic Braces
- Metal Braces
- Dental Insurance and Adult Braces
- Teeth Straightening in Adults
- Why Orthodontic Retainers Are Necessary
- What is an Orthodontist?
It’s not rocket science to come up with titles that include the target keyword. The URL of the page should also include the keyword in question, but here you can be more flexible. For example, the page title “Do You Need Adult Braces?” could be “do-you-need-adult-braces.html” or “adult-braces.html” or even just “adultbraces.html”. Or, in this case, maybe even “braces-for-adults.html” just to vary things.
Once you’ve gotten your initial list of titles, look for any gaps in content, and be sure to fill them in (or plan for it later). Look also for any opportunities to link between pages. For example, in the list above there’s a natural linking from the “types of braces” page to the pages about metal, ceramic, invisible and lingual braces.
Now sit down and write! Write for a human, not a search engine. I’ve already given some tips on how to do this in my previous post Human Search Engine Optimization, please spend a few minutes and read it.
The only other thing to think about is spacing out the delivery of your content. If your system supports it (I can do this with PLRSiteBuilder, and you can easily do it with WordPress) then use a scheduling feature to get the content posted at regular intervals instead of all at once. You’ll want to post the first two or three articles right away, but everything after that can “drip” out. This will ensure that your RSS feed (which your site should always have) has some new content every once in a while, at least for the first couple of weeks. After that you can decide to go and write some new content or just leave the site as-is. (My Invisible Fence site’s been up for years now with no changes…)
And make sure your sitemaps are updated as you add new content, too.
That’s it for today, I have to run off now and write the content for my new site! In the next post we’ll talk about what to do when the site is ready to go “live”.