I'm not going to bore you with fluff in this article, I'm just going to get
right down to the meat of it. When optimizing for a brand new website,
you need to do the following.
Choose Your Domain Name Carefully
Try to think with the customer in mind of what they would type if they only had
3 words to get to your website. For instance, an example for Affiliate
Watchdogs is Affiliate Program Marketing. It's best to have at least one of
your keywords in your domain name. Do not use dashes or any other special
characters in your domain name, it makes your website look cheap.
Get Your Home Page Ready
Get your home page up and running as quickly as possible. Make sure to have at
least 300 words on the home page. Use a distinct title ( <title> tag )
that is as close to 70 characters as possible without going over. Use a few
heading tags (<h1>, <h2>, <h3> ) that are short summary
separators. This webpage is a good example of how you should do it.
Do not put up sentences such as "Under Construction" or anything similar. The
major search engines do not like to index websites that are not finished.
Link Out To High Trust Websites
From your homepage, link out to 2-3 highly relevant websites that are
trustworthy. We suggest using .gov, .edu, or .org websites to link. Inner pages
are fine also. This will help build your website's TrustRank. Try to link out
to
different high trust websites from your inner webpages also.
Start Your Link Building
As soon as your home page is up, you need to get your brand new website
indexed. The best way that we have found is to use Best Of The Web
(
www.botw.org) and Microsoft Small Business Directory (
sbd.bcentral.com). Both
of these website have a high trustrank with Google and the major search
engines. With these two directory listings your website should become a PR 3-4
during the next PageRank update (Note: Google PageRank updates take place about
every 100 days).
Also, if your budget allows, get one more link from Text Link Ads from their "Top 25 Text Link Ads"
page
www.text-link-ads.com. These are the top 25 highest
ranked websites (by Alexa rating) that you can purchase links from. Important:
Make sure that the link that you purchase is highly relevant to your website.
For example, if your website is about affiliate marketing, make sure that the
website you get your link from is about affiliate marketing. It is very
important to have highly relevant one way links. You should expect to pay for
this one link for 12 months minimum.
Do Not Link Build
If you want to rank high on Google in the future, we highly suggest that you do
not link build at all with a brand new website. Your two directory listings and
one relevant link is all that is needed at this time. You need to let your
website "age" and grow. We recommend letting your website "age" for 6 months.
Although, each vertical market is treated differently. Meaning a knitting
website would need to "age" less than an affiliate program marketing website. A
knitting website would most likely by trusted sooner by Google. The more shady
the industry, the longer you should wait to link build.
Build Your Content
Now that your website will be getting indexed by the major search engines, you
need to build up your content and start making money. We recommend having 15
different menu items max and 15 sub-menu items under each main menu item. This
amounts to 226 webpages total for your website. We would expect that this
content will grow slowly over time (maybe over the course of a year). First
start with your main menu webpages. Go after the bigger keyword phrases that
are more difficult. Then, add the sub-menu pages with very specific niche
content.
You may want to do some in depth keyword analysis to determine what you should
write about. We will save this topic for another article.
Next Steps
Be very careful with your link building. Only link out to highly relevant
trusted websites. Trust is the new thing with
Google. Google still loves large
amounts of good content. Try to come up with new ways for your users to create
content for you. Try to come up with new ways for your users to
want to
link to you. We highly recommend that you read all of the articles listed on
Affiliate Watchdogs and continue to learn. We welcome you to join our forum to
ask questions and get expert advice.