SEO Guide - Part #1 - How to build a legit, branded web property? (14)
SEO Guide - Part #1 - How to build a legit, branded web property?
This is part 1 of a 2 part series about building a branded, legit website and how to create legit links. This is by no way a how to rank fast guide, this is more about how to really create a legit web property and how to build legit links to it (in part 2) with a longterm approach.
Building a branded / brand website is much more than your average thin affiliate site, so some costs, work and time are involved. I tried my best to really include as much as I can, in case you feel I missed some points, feel free to reply below and I’ll add everything I feel is worth it.
PART 1 – How to look legit in the eyes of Google (Onpage)
So here we are, starting our new brand online. We want to look legit and act as a brand, not as an affiliate. I’ll divide certain parts of the whole concept and idea behind this guide into separated stages, it’s a bit tricky to write an overall guide, but I'm trying my best:
1 – How’s a brand website different to your average MFA/affiliate site?
First of all, brands are usually eager to get in contact with their customers and visitors. Different to the 0815 MFA site, there are some aspects every legit brand includes on its website. Contact possibilities, sign up forms, disclaimer, all the shit we as affiliates do not care about.
So some basic elements require a bit of preparation / costs to setup them, but will pay off if you’re going to get reviewed manually:
1.1 – First steps to look real
Before even starting with your site, you want to look active and legit. I’m talking real legit shit like phone numbers, post address and all the stuff. Every real company has this published on their website and in my opinion ,it should look like the following:
Set up a virtual office / mailing box. Different providers are available to do this, but you have to provide an address on your site. This details should be included on a contact page. It comes with a bit of dollars you need to spent, but makes you look at least twice as legit compared tot he average affiliate sites
Set up a phone number. Skype number, virtual office number, it doesn’t matter as long as the number is active. Some virtual office providers offer phone pick up service for your brand name, that’s the easiest option to do. I love to publish this phone number right at the top or a widget on my brand website (or footer). It’s kind of a BOOM I’m legit I let you call me effect having a customer support hotline available. Even if you don’t pick up 9 out of 10 calls in the beginning, it’s there and it’s real for the reviewer.
1.2 Setting up your site / structuring your site
This is a bit tricky as it depends on the niche your brand is about. I assume you’re familiar for at least a bit with Wordpress and installing some plugins like SEO plugins or WPcache. I won’t cover the techs in this guide, it’s a whole different topic. Same goes for the usage of h1/h2 etc. tags or meta descriptions and keywords, it’s just too much of a topic to cover in this guide.
Personally I have nothing against Wordpress, just take a nice theme and get it customized to your needs by a coder or modify it to suit your needs. I normally take care of the following to make it look sweet and sexy:
Get a name. Every company needs a name. Since we’re building a brand, we want a name and not an exact match domain for our brand. Let’s face it, we’re not cars.com who can afford to combine both. A brand domain is a good indicator of being legit compared to EMDs used by shady SEOs. You can combine your keyword in your brand name. I would prefer Mobilecorner / HouseOfMobi as a brand name over MobileAdNetworkReviews.com given I want to build a brand.
Get a logo & corporate identity. A real company has its own logo and colors. Make sure you have a logo that matches your website design. A lot of websites will have their corporate identity reflected in the background colors, hyperlinks colors, <h> tags colors, banners, widget, you name it. This isn’t a 100% required to look legit, but personally I feel it’s a nice touch. If your logo is green and blue, how about making your outgoing links in the same green color? Or the widget headers in the same green or blue?
Contact page. Create a nice contact section on your site. Include your address, your phone number and a contact form on it. For some more awesomeness, include a google maps showing your company’s location.
Disclaimer / TOS / Privacy Policy. Get a disclaimer and privacy policy up. It’s just legit.
Structure your site. Make sure your site has a sitemap. Make sure your navigation flow is easy to understand and makes sense. Don’t create a single navigation point for every topic on the earth, better use deeppages for those longtails / sub categorys. Personally I hate sites having like 50+ categorys right in their main navigation bar. You’re building a site for humans, not for crawlers in the end.
Talking about an example, for a casino website, I would structure it like the following:
Include the stuff I mentioned above like contact etc. Then, as I know enough about the niche to tell you right off the bat which niches / categories are worth to have: Roulette, Blackjack, Slots, Online Casinos, Guides. I would use this 5 as the starting points in my navigation. If somebody clicks on Roulette, I’ll give him the option to navigate to Roulette Strategies, Best Roulette Casinos, a general Roulette guide, some more. For Online Casinos, I’ll include The top 10 casinos, best bonus casinos, best US/non-US casinos and so on.
Another example for an insurance site: Life Insurance, Car Insurance, Health Insurance and so on. Then again, let’s say life insurance, we give him the options of Life Insurance Agents, Life Insurance FAQs, Life Insurance Companies and so on.
The URL structure would look like the following: myfancyinsurancebrand.com/life-insurance/ would be the page for Life Insurance. Now for each topic, the structure continues like /life-insurance/life-insurance-agents/ or /life-insurance/faq/.
A good example of a clean and easy to understand navigation is Mr. Green’s GREENMANTLE. You got all the bullet points right in the top navigation, hovering over THELODGE you can choose some subpages / topics related to THELODGE. Some room for improvement, but the approach is spot on.
Collect E-Mails. Include a newsletter sign-up form right at the root of your brand. Once a visitor hits your site, you get the chance to collect his email for absolutely free. Don’t waste this opportunity. Plus it’s another step to look legit having a newsletter to stay in touch with your audience.
Get a blog. It’s an awesome way to create content without looking suspicious. The blog section can be linked from the main navigation or just from the footer, just make sure it’s sitewide interlinked. Hire a semi-professional writer to re-write whatever your niche news are and publish it. Keep it updated regularly and interlink to your category pages / deep pages for both, relevant content and to get the linkjuice flowing a bit. Make sure to use natural anchors in this interlinking, don’t limit it to the keywords you intent to rank for with the linked page. There are more ways to link to your life insurance page than using the exact match anchor, how about a contextual link with the anchor SOME DETAILS ARE EXTREMELY IMPORTANT to get your visitor more informations about the blogpost he’s reading? Personally I try to make sure the blog is at yourdomain.com/blog/ and NOT on a subdomain. By doing so, your domain gets a higher indexed pages count which certainly helps much more than hurts.
About us page. Tell a bit of a story about your brand, basically introduce yourself.
Include reviews / testimonials on a separated page / right at the root. Let your visitors know how happy your customers are. Obviously, how you get / create those reviews is up to you. Just include it and make them look real. The whole social proof package.
Include external widgets like facebook / twitter etc.. Get a sidebar or include them at specific pages. Every brand is active on facebook, twitter and the other social networks nowadays, at least it should be. There are specific niche related networks as well, make sure to join them all and get active there. More on this in the next paragraphs.
Include authority logos and outbound links. We know them from our landers, Virus-free, protected, verified, you name it. It’s easy to put a logo in there and doesn’t cost you much but looks real and legit again. If you got an article that’s related to an article on an authority site, link to it. There are more authority domains than Wikipedia you can link to.
Let people easily find what they’re looking for. Include a sitewide search box in your sidebar or footer or even at top. People definitely use it and you can collect some sweet keyword data from the searches they enter.
Stay alive and generate content. After your initial setup described above (main navigation pages), make sure to build content regularly. Start with the deeppages, if you got them all there, continue with your blog. Make sure your site is showing fresh content regularly. A great way to make it dynamic is include a RECENT BLOG POSTS WIDGET sitewide to let people know you’re alive and active. I much rather prefer to post 1 post every day than rush 10 posts today and don’t update over the next week.
For the real stackers: include a live-chat. No matter it’s temporary unavailable and people can send an e-mail, it looks super super legit to have a live chat feature available on your website. Huge companies have this often enough, I mean we’re building the site to entertain and provide value to our visitors, not for pure profits, right?
So after hitting the 10k chars mark, here's the bottom statement missing in the above:
This is pretty much my first move(s) if I take the brand route. There might be some points missing which I forgot (I’ll add anything that comes to my mind at a later point), but those are the very basics and will likely help you to pass the majority of any review you might face in future.
Next post is going to cover a bit about off-page such as social networks, syndication and similar topics. Probably going to be posted during this week with Part 2 following as well.
Any thoughts / love / hate feel free to drop them in the thread, if you liked it, there’s this little thanks button below this post 
<Part 2 of this first part is going to get posted in this post>
Awesome stuff!
Quite a bit of stuff I'd not thought of, and I've spent a while trying to make sites look legit in the past!
Any recommendations on good sources for pro-looking themes? Personally I like the Genesis themes for Wordpress - some very nice stuff in there.
You could take something from ThemeForest if you really like it and it's good OR get is customized.
Another option which is quite affordable is to get the perfect layout for your needs done into a PSD and hire someone to convert it into a WP Template. This is a bit more expensive, but shouldn't crack the 1k mark unless you want very unique features included. There are a shitload of coders around having amazing skills in those custom WP templates who aren't expensive at all. This is obviously just for the templates without any custom stuff included.
God damn I hate SEO. Greenmantle SEO is doing my head in. The problem with putting all this effort into a legit branded web property, is if you make one mistake you could fall off the rankings all to together....just like I did Fark.
Great post man! I haven't touched SEO in 4-5 years and so many things have changed.
I remember how easy SEO was 5 years ago. In 3 months I managed to get 50k uniques a day to one of my sites just by doing some link spamming and auto-posting.
Looks like going the legit route and producing high quality content is the way to go to make it long term.
Just to chime in here: Real branded properties also get quite a bit of searches for their brand in Google. Believe it or not, people actually enter the web site address or the company name in Google to find a site, rather than just type their full URL in the browser's address bar. There are clever ways to artificially inflate the # of searches for your brand, or you can of course create a solid ass property that makes people actually want to come back to your site.
This reminds me of newsmax.com, a great model for an authority website
This thing is a lubricated money machine. There are tons of ways they are monetizing, and I'm sure they've got a great following. Every article is made to either provoke curiosity, fear or excitement ("top 7 things.." etc). Look around at their ads and how they funnel users to their other properties to take different angles (including health) and the ads look like links to the rest of the website some even having long page sales letters. And with all that eye popping content you know they have run a email list. The writing really is nothing impressive at all , many are ripped from yahoo news and others. This whole site is setup to establish authority in a segment of readers, mostly overzealous right wings but they've got their own fairly popular magazine so that might be saying something.
What about pictures?
Of course they shouldn't look like they are from a Stock-Website especially pictures of the staff. But where do you get them?
Stock-Websites, Random Images From the Web (copyright infringement?) or do you commission a photographer?
Also what about these "As Seen On" Logo's?
And is it enough to get only mentioned to post it?
Can't wait for part 2.
If your site's been mentioned somewhere - provided it was editorial and not just a comment or something - I'd say you're OK to put up an "As Seen On" for that site.
Originally Posted by Mr Green
I built a site shortly after the fall out of Panda. I was (what I believed at the time) totally white-hat, within 3 months I was top three on the Goog in a niche with a buy keyword of over 60k+ searches a month plus traffic from 100s of longtails. The next 3 months the site was generating a turnover of over £10k per month which the GP was approx 60%.
My plan from the start was to get the site profitable, flip it and move onto the next project. I put it up on Flippa and hooked myself a serious buyer. He was (still is) a big player on EBay with the same product and wanted to get himself a presence in search. We agreed a price and the deal was on the verge of being completed. Then on a fateful Friday night in Oct 2012, Penguin update totally wiped it out and the deal with it. From consistent 800+ visitors a day to 0.
Soooooo... My two cents..If you are getting into SEO, definitely follow OP's advice as well as understand and thoroughly analyse what you are doing with your link campaign and IMO most importantly, try not to restrict the site to one traffic source. Look for other ways to drive visitors such guest posts on authority sites in your niche as well as getting active in forums and social media etc.
@caurmen on the Wordpress themes: I have a lifetime membership on Elegant Themes - https://www.elegantthemes.com/
Anyone want to download some great WP themes hit me up on PM, I'll share the login details
Any update on Part 2? Im working on a site for my mother. She is in the health and beauty niche. Just got her site up, blog, fb and twitter. I have no SEO experience but want to help her transition to an online income. Right now i'm Debating whether its best to just pay someone to do the SEO work? Then i can just focus on my Aff stuff. These SEO companies charge an arm and leg for their monthly services but how do you know if they are worth it or not?
Hey, thanks a lot for this. Going to be putting together a wordpress site for my mom's business and will use these suggestions.
Home > >