CWC Web Dev

So now we have a site online that looks in a reasonable state with some decent starting point content, it's time to start promoting it. The first point is making sure it is in the index by the search engines and if its not submitting it to them
Google: Check, 16 pages
Yahoo: Check, 1 page
Dogpile: Check, 1 page
Live Search: Nope, Submitted it here.
Excite: Check, 1 page

And some of the social sites:
del.icio.us - added
Stumble Upon - added


The next step (and this will take about a month) is to chase link exchanges. As good starting point we want 75 inbound links from other sites round the net. At this point these are just general links with the word lighting somewhere in the link, linking to the main page. When you are looking for them here are some good guidelines:
1. Make sure the sites are related to yours
2. Make sure the anchor text includes on of you keywords
3. Deep Links - if the links are specific to a topic link it to the right page on your site.
4. Domain And Page Authority - Higher the pagerank the better.
5. Make sure the links do not contain the NoFollow command.
6. Having the surrounding text on topic is said to help.
7. Link Position - the closer to the top left the better.
8. The smaller the number Of outbound links the better.
9. Link Age - The longer the link has been around the better
10. The longer the domain has been around the better
11. If the link is one way rather than reciprocal it's better.
12. Page Content - Have a judge of the page you are trying to get a link on. Is it a link farm or is it good content?
13. Frequently updated pages are better

Get linking...

Not that your content is ever done but although I haven't quite got to the end of my list it is time to start getting some inbound links. So in the next day or two I'll post about how to go about that and start to do it for my site. In the mean time a few stragglers have found my site and google has indexed most of my pages. And yes, there has been a few clicks, enough to bring me to just under 10% of my goal of being profitable already, much better than I would have expected. 18 days in of 90 days. I think we should be alright.

About 3/4 of the way through the first lot of content. For some reason we have already had two clicks and google has picked us up so we are listed now. It's against googles TOS to disclose how much you are getting but with the two small clicks we are 2.5% of our way to a profitable website.

Before put effort into publicising the site it's a good idea to get some starting content. 25 pages of 500+ words is a good starting point. Over the long run you are going to fill in all the gaps but it's best to start with the pages that are going to be the most popular. To find this out there are a few keyword tools out there on the web that can help you find what terms are most search for and thise are normally the best pages to start with:

Keyword Tools:

• Google's : https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
• Wordtracker's: http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/
• SEOBook's: http://tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

So for lighting, for the first 25 pages I'm going to cover:

1. dj lighting
2. led lighting
3. outdoor lighting
4. light bulb
5. lighting fixtures
6. track lighting
7. bathroom lighting
8. solar lighting
9. kitchen lighting
   
10. aquarium lighting
    
11. recessed lighting
12. chandelier lighting
13. emergency lighting
14. low voltage lighting
15. bathroom lighting
16. designer lighting
17. bedroom lighting
18. light switches
    
19. Garage Lighting

and I'll leave some room to cover off some basics to

1. Main page
2. Forum
3. Contact Us
4. resources
5. basic lighting principles
6. a project in the making your own section

Yes, that's a long list and I would to see if I can get through it in a week. I have in the past hire people to do this from elance. For 25 pages you can expect to pay $250+ and they can normally knock them out quite quickly and of a good quality. But that's going to take 9months to a year to recover, so if it's your first site, try and do it yourself.

As your writing try and remember our designing the content checklist.

The domain name
If you hadn't picked one up earlier from step 2, the now is a good time to get to buy a new domain name. This is another one you shouldn't over think. Search for one that is as short as you can with your topic in the title. There are a few little hints that can help. If you are using multiple words the put a dash (-) between them and I tend to favor .com's if I can get them but I do like .info's too and they are both $10 a year so that's not to hard to recover.

After a bit of work in the thesaurus and lots of already taken options, I came across www.lighting-bible.com and registered it.

Hosting
Choose what hosting you like but we have been around a while and godaddy's seems to be the best option for a low cost starting out option with some room to grow. They have a deluxe plan for $7 a month and you can have unlimited domains, which if you are repeating this is a great option. get what you want, but I would use that as a bit of a benchmark. They also have the added benefit of if you sign up you get your hosting for two bucks. So for our little experiment that's what we'll use.


Yuck... we've spent some money
I case you hadn't read the previous post ( and I suggest you do) , if you do want to make a profit the easiest way to do it is spend as little as possible, so if you see us spending money you'll know it's the bare minimum you can spend to be successful. So we have forked out 79.68 for the hosting for a year + 1.99 for the domain which is 81.67 for the year which works out at about $20 for our 90 day experiment. Doesn't seem so hard now does it, but thats the trick. If you spend some time now and $20 make a profit you can almost forget the website and your costs will stay the same and your income will slowly creep up and you can repeat it over and over. That should be all we need to spend so lets see if we can recover our money.

There's nothing there yet but you can check it out - lighting-bible.com

The Layout
Now this is an easy one. The trick here is to keep it simple. Users are not going to come to your site because it looks good, they re coming to get some information from it. And they are not going to wait for the information so keep it small to make sure it loads quickly. I think a logo its great, but don't fill your page with pictures, you want it to load quickly. You also want to keep it easy. If the navigation etc is too complete people will give up, so make it easy to read. Browse through some CSS Templates and pick one quickly, don't waste to much time on this. Your readers don't care if its blue or green just that its has what they are looking for and it's simple, loads quickly and they can find what they want when they are there.

Now I tend to favour a certain layout to get the most of the sites:


Lets see if we can find one: After about a half hour or so I found one called fastforwardthink that should do nicely.

Navigation Design
Ok, now is when you need to start thinking about content and which categories your topic can be divided into, yo get a navigation menu. Now there are some common items you should have on there 1) Home - A link that takes them back to the main page and 2)Links or Resources - A page for links to other sites. Some people also like to add forums and contact pages. But for lighting I'm going to go with

1. Home
2. Basic Lighting Principles
   
3. Lighting Design
   
   1. Lighting Atmosphere
   2. Stylish Lighting
   3. Dramatic Lighting
   4. Lighting Tricks
   5. Lighting for Occasions
      
4. Lighting by Area
   1. Entrance
   2. Hall
   3. Stairs
   4. Living Room
   5. Dining Room
   6. Kitchen
   7. Bedroom
   8. Bathroom
   9. Kids Room
   10. Garage
   11. Workrooms
       
5. Doing it Yourself
   1. lighting Safety
   2. Hardware and electrics
   3. Bulbs
   4. Switches
   5. Accessories
6. Making your own
7. Forum
8. Contact Us
9. Resources

I'm sure you can come up with a good list for your topic pretty quickly.

Designing the Content
To make this successful you need to plan out what you need to cover on each page. Where not quite up to writing it yet but planning these before hand is a good idea.

Make Sure -

1. each page has 1-5 keywords that you are targeting
2. each page has a unique title using some or all of the keywords
3. your keywords are used in the headings
4. you use your keywords in bold at least once
5. you have internal links on your site to the page using the keywords.
   
6. your keywords are used 5 - 10 times each in of your content.

Step two is optional but it can help a lot if you do manage to do it, but it can take a little time so it's a good idea to start it early.

Grabbing a used domain name
A reputable domain with inbound links takes a while to build and has an inherent value that you can make use of. Thousands of domains name expire every day and some of these still have a good page rank, inbound links and are indexed in the search engines. Th hard part is trying to find on of these on your topic and getting it at a good price. Remember any money you spend you have to earn.

Where to find one
The best source we have found is the domain name aftermarket (tdnam). It's not free but I don't think the $5 is a bad deal to sign up. The other good thing is you can browse round before you sign up, so don't sign up until you see a domain you want to buy. First of I jumped into tdnam and did a search for all domains with out topic in the title - "lighting". Now that has returned 800ish results.

Wheat from the chaff
So you have 800 possible domain names from this tool, how do you know which ones are good. We tend to do a pass through each of these to see what the page ranks of each are (pagerank is googles 0-10 rating of the quality of sites). Now we grab these 100 at a time and run them through this tool - PageRank Lookup. That give us a pagerank for each one and we pick out the ones with a higher ranking. Now amongst the 800 possible domains only 4 had a rating above 0

• PR1 - http://aaalightingfx.com/
  
• PR1 - http://neworleanslighting.com/
  
• PR1 - http://incandescentlighting.com/
  
• PR3 - http://lightinglandscape.com/
  

Now page ranks can be faked and you do also want addition information so I also run these through this tool http://www.domainpagerank.com/ and it give you if they are valid or not and a few extra bits of information Alexa Traffic Rank (the lower the better) and the number of backlinks in the major search engines (the higher the better). Now these are all valid and obviously lightinglandscape is the best and aaalightingfx looks alright. Looking aback at what we
are trying to achieve - a profit - the cost of these is important. Lightinglandscape is going for $441 - probably a fair price but for our goals not good. aaalightingfx is going for $10 which pretty much the same cost as getting a new domain so thats good. It is however not the best name and it has no alexa traffic rank and only 60 inbound links and none in google. So let's have a look at another tool - the wayback machine. This tool show you the history of websites, you can even have a look at the content. From this tool we can see it started in 2000, the longer a site is around the better and 2000 is good, so good it makes one a little curious why it is only PR1. Looking through it's original content you can see it was a lighting sales site, perfect, later on and for the last few years it does look like a site full of spam though, not a reputation I want to inherit.

So, unfortunately, in this case, it doesn't look like I can nab an old expiring. Oh well, if I can do it the hard long way, you can spend a few more days or weeks looking for the right topic or waiting for the right domain name.