Traffic to website in development? ? ? ?

[Holdthescroll]

My goal is to begin getting clicks to my website while it is still being developed. I'm trying to get people interested in it and trying to get it indexed or put the site in an excellent position to be indexed before it is up and running. What are my options? I assume getting one-way links to my site would be hard to pull off (unless I buy the links), as the people would generally want to see a page before linking to it. I know what I want to write about on my website. For example, I know that a section of my website will be titled "How do I pay for the product?". Should I throw up a wordpress blog and write articles about how people pay for the product? Anyway, I am still a noob to this but from what I understand (please correct this!) your website gets indexed based on:

I. how many sites link to yours
a. how many of the linking sites are similar? to yours
b. how many of the links are one-way
II. how many blogs link to your site
a. your own blogs linking to your website shouldnt be on the same host or you get screwed by google
b. how popular the blog linking to your site is?
III. how many articles link to your site
IV. how relevant your domain name is to the keyword being searched in google

probably a lot more but i am a fucking NOOB

i should mention that i do not want to rely so much on PPC to get traffic, I just want to get my site a top ranking on google/yahoo/msn for certain keywords.

 

[jryan21]

Concentrate on writing 2 or 3 good articles for your topic before you get into anything else.

Words on the page come before all of these:

I. how many sites link to yours
a. how many of the linking sites are similar? to yours
b. how many of the links are one-way
II. how many blogs link to your site
a. your own blogs linking to your website shouldnt be on the same host or you get screwed by google
b. how popular the blog linking to your site is?
III. how many articles link to your site
IV. how relevant your domain name is to the keyword being searched in google

And whatever you do, don't put any blank pages up that read "under construction." It was cool in 1997, but now it just makes people mad.

 

[Holdthescroll]

Concentrate on writing 2 or 3 good articles for your topic before you get into anything else.

Words on the page come before all of these:



And whatever you do, don't put any blank pages up that read "under construction." It was cool in 1997, but now it just makes people mad.

What about this then:

I create an "about us" page on my main website which would include an overview of the site, mission statement, and bios of contributors

Then I create WP blogs for all the contributors with posts heavy in keywords my main website will target & one-way links to the main website

Then I start writing very general/vague articles teasing the website (should these be through WP too? what are my options?)

Am I neglecting any other good options? Can this plan be improved upon? I'm most concerned with how I go about getting my page indexed well ... I don't fully understand WHY writing articles and blogs will improve my rankings

 

[jryan21]

Are you going to have real contributors or are you going to create them on your own?

Check out the blogroll feature in wordpress. You will find that what you were describing is going to be a whole lot less work than you are expecting.

Basically, once you get some articles posted, you can look around for other blogs in your topic; read the articles they wrote and if you read something interesting, leave a comment there and relate it to your article (and link). Get to know the other bloggers in your topic. If you can get them to add you as a contributor on their blog (and their blog is considered an "authority" site), you will get a little SEO juice.

That is one of the ways good content can improve your rankings.

 

[fm1234]

Am I neglecting any other good options?

For about the same amount of work involved in setting up a link farm you can just put up quality content. I have a thirteen-page site that has 0 backlinks, the content was uploaded in May or so, it has not been updated since and every page of the site is indexed. Is it highly ranked? No. But the whole thing has found its way into both G and Y! based purely on the content, and it is on page three for two of its keyphrases.

(again, I know: "Page three! who gives a fuck!" But again, no promo, no links, nothing -- just quality content* a sitemap and well-linked navigation.)

Frank
*just a little pimpin' -- 100% of the content on the site was written by the WickedFire member Trademark. Best writer I've ever hired imo.

 

[Holdthescroll]

For about the same amount of work involved in setting up a link farm you can just put up quality content. I have a thirteen-page site that has 0 backlinks, the content was uploaded in May or so, it has not been updated since and every page of the site is indexed. Is it highly ranked? No. But the whole thing has found its way into both G and Y! based purely on the content, and it is on page three for two of its keyphrases.

(again, I know: "Page three! who gives a fuck!" But again, no promo, no links, nothing -- just quality content* a sitemap and well-linked navigation.)

Frank
*just a little pimpin' -- 100% of the content on the site was written by the WickedFire member Trademark. Best writer I've ever hired imo.

This site will be ALL content! there's nothing like it out there
I just need good rankings to make the $$ from affiliations and to have reason to continue expanding the site

the only problem is there is one major competitor (whom I will DESTROY when operational), but his website is ranked extremely high on major major keywords + he is bidding shitloads on PPC ... so I need to be ranked very very high also to take all of his business basically

I'm going to take drastic steps to make sure that my website is designed with SEO in mind, even if it means hiring a team to do it for me, but to get to the very very top of the list, design alone ain't cuttin it here

 

[fm1234]

I guess I'm a little muddy on your proposed process then. If you want to get rankings while the site is in dev, build the front and back first -- an informative index page, nav structure in place, custom 404, about, privacy, contact and sitemap. But this is how a site should be built regardless of ranking strategy or goals -- so not clear if this is what you're asking. All this stuff:

I create an "about us" page on my main website which would include an overview of the site, mission statement, and bios of contributors

Then I create WP blogs for all the contributors with posts heavy in keywords my main website will target & one-way links to the main website

Then I start writing very general/vague articles teasing the website (should these be through WP too? what are my options?)

Am I neglecting any other good options? Can this plan be improved upon?

Seems like a crazy amount of work that is also creating a ton of content that will not be on the site ... when if you just had the content on the site, then voila, it's developed. Is there some other part of dev like a product that is still in pre-production phase, therefore keeping the site from being "ready?" I mean: why not just put all that content on the site itself rather than on blogs and such pointing to the empty site?


Frank

 

[Holdthescroll]

I guess I'm a little muddy on your proposed process then. If you want to get rankings while the site is in dev, build the front and back first -- an informative index page, nav structure in place, custom 404, about, privacy, contact and sitemap. But this is how a site should be built regardless of ranking strategy or goals -- so not clear if this is what you're asking. All this stuff:



Seems like a crazy amount of work that is also creating a ton of content that will not be on the site ... when if you just had the content on the site, then voila, it's developed. Is there some other part of dev like a product that is still in pre-production phase, therefore keeping the site from being "ready?" I mean: why not just put all that content on the site itself rather than on blogs and such pointing to the empty site?


Frank

I don't have any experience creating websites or doing SEO, so I don't really know if my plan will even help my site get ranked. This will be my first website ever. Is doing the blog/article thing effective at improving rankings at all? I don't think it would be a crazy amount of work to throw up 3 WP blogs and then add a link to my site, but I don't know much about blogging. Would I have to do more than just write a post on each one and add a link to benefit my rankings?

The "product" is already out there. All of the website's revenue will come from affiliate programs (organizations trying to sell the "product" in one form or another). All affiliates that I intend to work with currently have contracts with my main and only competitor. The website will be all about the "product", of which myself and contributors have years and years of experience working with that the competitor does not.

Also, since I'm so serious about making this thing a success, do you think it's worth going through a development team for site-creation, or would it be better to get a program like SBI! to do it yourself?

 

[fm1234]

Well, starting from the bottom up, SBI! is definitely not the answer. It costs too much, and if you ever stop using the service you have to redo the site -- you keep the content but not the visual design. Also, SBI! is not doing it yourself.

As far as team vs. doing it yourself, I'm a big fan of outsourcing -- but you might consider doing it yourself because you need to learn how anyway. You can communicate with a team much more effectively when you can tell them what you want, make adjustments (code, content etc.) on the fly and that kind of thing. But all of this sounds a lot like you're overplanning, or I'm misunderstanding -- I mean, at the root of all of this is this idea that you want to get the site to rank before it exists, which doesn't make a lot of sense, but if you want to get a crapload of links or whatever, with no site there at all, the only two ways that I can think of to do that is via blackhat or some kind of viral marketing (think Cloverfield, which was buzzed all over the Internet before anyone had even a remote idea what the hell it was about. Or fuelbank.com which has been featured on major news shows, tech sites, offline magazines etc. again and again for more than a year and last I checked still has no firm launch date.)

Put up some kind of USP or teaser that will get people linking to the site and you might be able to get it virally promoted enough to get huge traffic without ever having a "real" site.

But in the meantime, what remains is the question of why you'd even want to do any of that. Just build the site and get it ranked -- your competitor will still be there ready to be crushed. It sounds almost like you're trying to sneak attack the competition by just popping up on page one of the SERPs, and you might be disappointed to find that that doesn't have as much effect on his business as you might feel. Surely he's not the only other guy in the niche right?


Frank

 

[Holdthescroll]

Surely he's not the only other guy in the niche right?


Frank

Literally, it would be him vs me, and the only way for me to be successful (financially) is to win all of his affiliates; and i intend on doing that by doing what his website does using a completely different content scheme + pulling some connections that I would already have in the industry to more easily win the affiliates. In my opinion and the opinion of some people I know, his website is going downhill and he is not really in any position to change his style in time.

 

[fm1234]

If the site is affiliate-driven, then imo you're pointing in the wrong direction trying to outdo him via SEO. Sign up as an affiliate (if you haven't already) and design a better plan, try to find some performers in his program and poach them off. {POOF} he's fucked.

I've seen CB sellers do that to one another numerous times and it seems to be a profitable hobby.


Frank