January 29th, 2009 | by Court | Published in For Beginners | 29 Comments
Getting your site set up properly isn’t really that tough, once you have chosen the right topic and domain name.
I know that setting up a site properly is intimidating when you’re a beginner. The overall process is sometimes hard to visualize. To help with this, I went out of my way to create a simple example site that will help you to see the process of setting up a site properly and with that, let me introduce you to PlaceYourKeywordHere.com. Place Your Keyword Here is a special little site that you can use as an example – a template for how you should be setting up your niche sites. It has the main keyword (place your keyword here) in all the right places, so all you have to do is look for it and duplicate it. There are articles on the site that explain why the keyword is placed where it is, and step-by-steps for how to implement everything.
I can tell you that if you will follow the very simple steps that are outlined on that site, you will have better onsite search engine optimization that 99% of your competitors. The honest truth is that most people don’t do a super good job with this and if you can follow basic instructions you can be better than just about anyone.
For those of you that have never set up a site before, I have a short series of videos that can help you to get the technical stuff out of the way:
How To Register A Domain Name
How To Buy Hosting on Host Gator
Pointing Your Domain At Your Hosting Account
Finalizing Hosting And Installing WordPress
How To Install A New WordPress Theme
As soon as you have your site set up, you can use PlaceYourKeywordHere.com to get the right words in the right places. Please let me know if you have any questions about using the site – I think it should be fairly straightforward but familiarity blindness could have made me miss something that needs to be explained better. I want to make it as useful as possible so seriously, hit me up with your questions.
January 26th, 2009 | by Court | Published in Domains | 16 Comments
Before you get this far, you should have chosen a topic for your site. As you’ll see in this lesson, choosing a domain name before you choose a topic isn’t wise. You need to know what keyword traffic you’re going to go after before you can choose a domain name that will work well for you.
Learning how to choose a domain name for your website is quite simple, especially if you’re setting up a simple niche site.
People tend to get really confused when it comes to choosing a domain because of all of the conflicting strategies and advice that is out there. In order to make this as effective as possible, let’s define two totally different types of sites:
- Niche informational sites – This series is designed to teach you how to create these. Niche informational websites are probably the most effective types of sites for individuals to make. They are generally somewhat small but still provide solid information, albeit about a small topic.
- Flagship sites – These sites generally have hundreds of pages and are designed to obtain readers and repeat visitors. These are great selling tools for advanced internet marketers but can be a lot to manage.
How To Choose A Domain Name For A Niche Informational Site
Please keep in mind that this lesson is addressing only how to select domains for a niche informational site. Here is my preferred order that I always follow when choosing domains for my niche sites:
- The .com version of the main keyword of your niche site – placeyourkeywordhere.com. If it’s available, register it and your search is over. An example of this would be trying to register cheapcellphoneplans.com if your keyword was ‘cheap cell phone plans’.
- The .net version of your keyword – placeyourkeywordhere.net. Obviously you’re going to go with the .com if it’s available and if it’s not, try the .net. An example of this would be trying to register cheapcellphoneplans.net if your keyword was ‘cheap cell phone plans’.
- The .com version of your keyword with an additional word at the beginning or the end. For example, placeyourkeywordhereguru.com. There are plenty of words you can add to your keyword to make this work including site, shop, info, guide, guru, gurus, best, and online. Find one that works for you and register it.
The bottom line for a niche website is to get your keyword in your domain, and to use a .com or a .net.
We use Proud Domains to register our domains. They have 24/7 phone support, are very reliable, and cost less than GoDaddy and Register.com.
Update: Here’s an auxiliary lesson on this topic: Should I Use Dashes Or No Dashes In My Domains?
