One of my main goals with Place Your Keyword Here was to give you a place you could go to take a look at how a niche website should be set up. I created that site to not only show you to structure your site and content, but it’s also an example of what kind of content you need to have as well.
If your keyword really was ‘place your keyword here’, you would need to make sure that you gave people some good instruction on how to ‘place your keyword here’. I created 5 mini lessons for that site that I believe cover the topic well.
What To Do When You Don’t Know The Topic
Creating content about placing your keyword in the right places was very easy for me. I have the expertise and I have tons of experience. I’ve gone through that process literally hundreds of times. While it’s slightly harder to create content about topics you don’t know well, it can still be done with relative ease.
Remember back in school when you had to write research papers? In order to create content about unfamiliar topics, you have to get yourself back in that mindset. When you were in school, what did you do? I’m guessing back then you probably went to the library to look for articles, checked encyclopedias, and maybe talked to people that knew more than you did. Some of the younger of you probably used the internet to do a ton of research.
Doing a simple Google search for your keyword will show you the pages that Google believes to have the best information on your topic and that’s often the best place to start. You can also check Wikipedia – they have an obviously huge depot of information about many topics. After you’ve taken a look at those, you can look at EzineArticles.com – they should have some articles that were written by other people like you.
When you go through all of the information during the research phase, you need to take notes of the important points that need to be covered in your content. I usually jot down all of the main points, and then use those points to type up what I need.
You can’t take content from other people, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t use ideas that other people have. You need to use your own words and put in your own thoughts. This might make some of you nervous but after time it becomes really easy. Once you’ve done it 10+ times it will honestly feel a lot easier than it does now.
We’re trying to create solid information, but we aren’t exactly trying to win a bunch of awards. Do your best.
The Minimum Amount Of Content
In order to get your site to rank well, it will probably need to have at least 5 unique articles (posts – whatever you want to call them). While you can rank with less words than this, I would recommend writing articles that are at least 300 words. For your home page, I usually like to see an article that has 600+. Since your home page is the one that needs to rank for your main keyword, we want it to have a solid amount of content. I’ve said this before, but you want to make sure that you use your keyword in the title of the post that appears on the home page. You then want to use your keyword two or three times in the post itself, and then you want to use it as a tag for the post. This will add keyword relevancy to your site and will help it to rank better than it would otherwise.
I like to use quite a few tags when I publish posts because it really helps to increase the size of your little site. A 5-post site is quite small and adding 10 tags will give you 10 pages in Google’s index – WordPress will create a unique page for each tag that you use. 20 tags will give you 20 extra pages, and so on.
Let’s recap what you’re going to need on each site:
- 1 home page article with 600 words of content
- 4 additional articles with 300 words of content
- 10-30 tag pages
How To Structure The Content
Inevitably I’m going to have people ask in the comments how to set up the content. 
Guys if you can’t see how to do the structure, go the Place Your Keyword Here. All you have to do is copy the setup there, using your keyword.
Tags: Content, create content, niche website, place your keyword here
Court,
i completely agree with you. once you do it several times it comes a lot easier. what i did when i first started was to find 3 to 5 articles or sources of info, good info about the topic. i would read each one closely and then just start writing in my own words a summary of what they said.
easy way to make your own unique stuff!
what or how do you keep you big main article on the front page? do you use the “home” page for this or sticky it to the front page? wp2.7 now will let you do this.
sorry for no caps but i’m down to henpecking with one arm for 3 to 4 months…bad shoiulder
Elliott since they just started allowing you to do a sticky, I haven’t ever really done that. In the past I just made it my most recent post by manipulating the dates.
One of my sites has a home.php file so I just use that. Any of the three would be great!
Is there a concern over duplicate content penalty by using your many tag approach?
Steve Google is pretty good at figuring this stuff out nowadays. If you’re worried about it, you can configure your tag pages to show only excerpts!
I have a pretty simple question for you in regards placeyourkeywordhere.com wordpress site. There are a ton of plugins, and I find my self adding a new one here and there because I think “oh I for sure need this one”. Would you give us a list of the “must haves”, and “could do withouts”?
Mark I would for sure install the All-In-One SEO pack. Other than that it really just comes down to what functionality you want. On a bigger site it’s quite useful to use a Related Posts plugin but on a smaller site it won’t have much affect.
Hi Court & Mark: I have two questions, both pertaining to hosted Wordpress.
At placeyourkeywordhere.com, you recommend using tags as a way to add more pages to your site without doing more writing. Do categories work the same way? Wordpress has both, and I’ve never quite understood the difference (if there is any).
Second, what do you put in the tagline box on the general settings page? Does this box generate meta tags, and if yes, do you use them?
Thanks!
Hey Lorecee!
Yes categories would work the same way. Categories could be used in place of tags. They aren’t really meant for that but it would work just fine.
I use categories to categorize and tags to label the content. I know there isn’t a huge difference!
A post on link building will probably go in my Link Building category but would/could be tagged with ‘inbound links’, ‘offsite SEO’, ‘anchor text’, ‘SEO’, ‘traffic generation’, and anything else the post covered.
Steve: there’s a lot of misleading information on the internet about duplicate content. Google has actually said on its official webmaster blog that the penalty is largely a myth:
The link is here.
What’s the theme you are using for the keyword site?
Also, how do you feel about pages instead of posts? Do you think have 4 or 5 static pages is better or worse than having 4-5 blog posts?
That theme is actually called inove. I can’t ever get pages to rank as well Matt. In theory it shouldn’t make a difference. The only thing I can think of that would explain it is that when the pings go out, pages don’t get as many links.
interesting as famed SEOer joost said that pages tend to rank higher…hmmm
WordPress gives pages sitewide links. If you do this with a post, it will do better. Matt don’t take people’s word for it. Test it yourself.
Thank you for pointing out that only 5 posts are needed… obviously, the more you have, the more landing pages you have (since every page is a landing page). Your original snip**g article said a minimum of 10 pages, but I had a site that I only did 7 pages with, and it made me over $14k last year…
But yah, 5 is probably a good minimum, but the more the merrier, if optimized well.
Absolutely!! The more posts you create, the more traffic you can ‘land’.
I personally like to keep adding posts for as long as I have related keywords to go after.
Hi Court
Just wanted to say that I’ve been reading your stuff for a while now and it is flat out the best content I’ve found (along with Gary Vaynerchuk of course!)
I’m UK based and I wonder whether we have the traffic volume to make a decent income from niche sites – do you have a minimum volume of searches/month for a niche before you consider it as viable?
Keep up the great work!
Hadi if I were you I would target the U.S. market. If you buy .com domains and host your sites on U.S. servers you’ll rank in the .com version of Google.
For me the search volume that I needs depends on the CPC. If the CPC is pretty high it might be worth going after a keyword that only has 3,000 searches per month. If it’s lower, I might need 10,000 searches to make it worthwhile.
I’m interested about this, does it really matter where in the world a .com site is hosted with regards to ranking in Google.com?
Will a .com site hosted in Australia (or Austria for that matter) be worse of that a site hosted in the USA?
Thanks for all the advise!
What about going to someplace like Digital Point or Site point and buying content for a niche website? Is there any value in doing so aside from saving time to write an article yourself?
In regards to tags I always think of them as one or two words but does it have any impact (good or bad) to write a tag that is several words long? For example “acme supplies” vs “acme organic gardening supplies”.
Thanks for another great article by the way!
Sorry snakes I’m not sure what you’re asking me. I guess I wouldn’t see any difference between purchased and self-written content. If you bought better content than what you could write I guess it would be better…
Tags can be as long as you want… You are the master of your domain.
Thanks great article. How long after the site is up do you add Google adwords to the site? Do you wait until the site is indexed first?
Interesting. I wonder when I am going to get off my ass and do some keyword research. I really need to get going on at least a few niche sites. I like the idea so much but always stop when it comes to the keyword research part.
I understand the theory behind the 5 posts + tags to be able to have more pages indexed. However, I have run into an issue with a couple of my sites where the only thing that gets indexed are the posts and the tags don’t make it in.
Is there something I can do, short of posting more, to get more pages indexed?
Hi, I was wondering if at the bottom of your posts whether or not it is necessary to mention the articles you learned the stuff from. Thanks!
Just wanted to say how greatful I am for all the information you provide. I can not begin to express my gratitude. I found your Keyword Crash Course by accident and am very glad I did. I am on my way to building the first of hopefully many Wordpress niche blogs and thanks to you have an optimistic outlook. Thanks Again!!