Well, my first full-fledged content site is up and so far so good. Google has found me and I am ranking on my keyword terms from the second page to the seventh page and its only been live less then a month.

Here is everything that I have done:

Domain -
The domain has been registered for about 6 months. It’s a good idea to register a domain as soon as possible for as long as possible. Many spammy sites register a domain one day for as little time as possible and then have a site up the next day. Aging helps the SE’s know you are not a spammy site.

I choose a domain with the main keyword in it. For example if the keyword was boats, the domain would be www.moreboats.com . Get that keyword in there.

Site -

The site is a simple html table based design using CSS for formatting. I was going to outsource the design just to save time, but wasn’t happy with the work that the bidders had done or the price for that matter. They wanted $500 for crap work. I made a template in Dreamweaver and made editable regions for the main text area, title, meta keywords, meta description, and subheader. A template is a great way to make updates more efficient. I just added google analytics to the site and I was able to put the code in the template and it updated the rest of the pages automatically a great timesaver.

I also installed a Wordpress blog on a subdirectory (eg.. www.moreboats.com/updates) Cpanel, avaliable with most hosting plans, makes this very easy to do. I am using the default wordpresss theme. The current version of Wordpress allows you to change the color of the header image so I matched that to the color of the main site.

That’s basically it for the site. I learned what I know about design from the Lynda.com tutorial on Dreamweaver 8, the book Dreamweaver 8 the missing manual. I also picked up some html and css from the Tizag.com tutorials. It’s a good idea to brush up on both. It will help you cleanup/trouble shoot the Dreamweaver code. Html and css are pretty intuitive unlike some of the other heavier coding languages.

Text -
I hired out the text creation to a local writer I found by a posting I made on a college campus. I didn’t have her optimize the text she wrote for keywords, as its my philosophy that well written text will contain the right ratio of keywords. I want her to focus on creating the best quality content and not where to put some word.

Admittedly I did change a few words in the articles because I was optimizing for two keywords, but the changes I made were maybe 1-2 words per article and again, I didn’t want that to be her focus.

Header Text-
Instead of a header image I went for a heading which is shared by all pages and then a subheading which changes for each page. I used the <h1> html tag for the heading and changed the formatting attributes using CSS. The heading has the main keyword in it. The subheading has a misspelling of the main keyword that using Wordtracker I found was searched for lots. The sub header also includes the secondary keyword I was optimizing for. I used the <h2> html tag for the sub header.

Meta Info -
The title of your page might be the most important aspect in terms of search engine optimization. I had the main keyword and secondary keyword in all of my title pages. I also put in meta keywords and a meta description for each page. At first I didn’t have a meta description for each page. I only did it for a few pages and then realized it would take a good amount of time to do. After the site had been live for a little while and found by Google, it was clear the meta descriptions were being used for the pages that had them. For the pages that didn’t the text in the links column pf the page was being used as a description, which gave no indication of what the page was really about. I went back and added meta descriptions to the rest of the pages.

Pictures -
I used this thread from dailykos.com to find picture sources. One thing to keep in mind is that all pictures that are taken by the government are not copyrighted. That’s right, although sometimes it may seem otherwise, they work for us so whatever they create is public domain. I have used a few images from flickr. Be sure to check out the license before putting them on your site. The ones I have used I credit in the copyright section of the site and include a link from the picture to the source on flickr. A lot of the images are more artistic then images you’d get form other sources so they can add some nice”pop” to a site.

Promotion -
I used Website Submitter to submit to all of the on-topic directors, plus all of the directories that were pr6 and above, as well as the SE’s. Website Submitter is a good piece of software that makes the submission process easier by automatically filling in the fields for you. It allows for multiple link texts, and descriptions. My experiences with paying for directory submissions have been bad. I paid $30 for a health related blog to be submitted to 300 directories. I only realized it a month or so after the transaction, but the guy had submitted the blog to the computer category in the directories. I ended up with one link from a page about computers and a lot of spam to that email address.. a waste of $30.