Site Set Up Nuts And Bolts
Before I dive into today’s post I want to share a few thoughts with you.
I remember when I first started renovating aged domains, that it was around this step of the process that I began to feel a little discouraged. Things can get a somewhat technical when it comes to setting up sites and everyone seems to have their own way of doing things and it can get a little confusing with all the conflicting advice on offer. The key for me was to stick at it, find out who was the best at what I needed to learn and take their ideas and run with them as fast as I could. I went off an studied anything I didn’t understand until it made sense.
You can waste so much time and money chasing the next guru showing you the way to online enlightenment.
My advice is to find a teacher you connect with and give their material a chance to work for you, ….or not. So many of us spend too much time chasing the non existent silver bullet to quick online success, jumping from one course to another and never actually doing anything other than making these guys rich.
If some of this process sounds a bit geeky, that’s ok. All you have to do is note the parts that you don’t quite grasp and go and find someone who has mastered it and learn.
In the last post we went through the finding and buying process. Today I want to show you what I do with my newly acquired aged domain.
As I mentioned in a previous post, it’s crucial to leave the domain on then same registrar that you bought it from. The website you’re going to build can be hosted anywhere you like. I always make sure my sites are hosted on good cpanel hosts that haven’t been modified by the hosting company. This ensures that I don’t have any issues with installing through wp direct.
The first thing I do after I take over a domain is point the DNS to the new hosting account and setup a cpanel account for the domain. I always use word press for my blogs and I’ll install the blog through word-press direct, but you can also use fantastico which is free and comes with most hosting accounts offering cpanel. Just check with any potential hosting company to make sure they offer it.
If you’re new to all this, there are some great YouTube videos on the subject and of course you can learn all this over at the challenge.
When renovating an aged domain you want to keep as many of the links that were pointing to the domain as possible and the best way to do this is to put similar or even better content on your new site.
Remember, you only own the domain and have no rights to the content that was on the site, so you can’t just copy the old content.
I do this by either looking through the site on Way-back Machine at archive.org or entering “site:whatever the domain is.com” into google and going through the cached pages and populating the site with content. Lately, I’ve starting using the SEO plug-in for google chrome and it works really well too.
Also, If you’re using Market Samurai you can find all the site’s anchor text links for yahoo there and use that to recreate pages.
It’s important to make sure your keyword is in the Page URL, title tags and header tags to get the most SEO value.
It can take time, particularly if it was a large site with lots of pages, but if you spend the time it can really pay off.
One of the main reasons I like using wordpress direct is that the initial installation sets the site up with some great SEO plug-ins to help manage and build the site. However there are a few that I like to add myself.
When building sites on aged domains, there will always be links coming into pages that you haven’t accounted for and these will result in 404 error messages and lost links if you don’t fix things fast.
I use the Redirection plug-in, which is a complete 404error and 301redirection solution. Basically a 301 redirect works by passing a URL through to any another URL you want, thus avoiding any dead ends and lost links.
This is only a short term solution for any pages I have missed in the setup and if I don’t recreate the original page on the new site, I will eventually lose the links to that page.
I know, it’s a confusing explanation , so let’s look at our “blowupdolls.com” example.
If the old site had a page titled ” puncture repair kits for blow up dolls” (apparently it’s a common hazard) and I don’t have that page on the new site, I’ll set up a redirect and tell the search engines that the page is now at the homepage ” blowup dolls.com” or any other page I think appropraiate. Now instead of an error message and a dead end, the homepage will appear and I’ll keep the link, giving me time to recreate the original page.
Once I’ve taken care of the house keeping, the fun can start.
These days there are two plug-ins that I just can’t live without. They’re not free, but worth every cent.
The first is RSS Bomber which comes with a free copy of the second, Link Daemon.
I won’t go into too much detail about the plug-ins, other than to say I have had smashing results with them both and they come with great ” how to guides”.
RSS Bomber turns every post on your site into it’s own RSS feed. Normally a site will have one RSS feed for the entire site, one for comments and bigger, more complex sites might have a couple of extra feeds set up.
What happens now is that your site has as many individual RSS feeds as it has posts and it’s a matter of submitting these new feeds to as many RSS directories and aggregators as you like.
You can now grab multiple top ten positions in google and dominate the first page.
With Link Daemon you set up a system of internal links via pre-selected anchor text, linking to any page on the site you want.
Internal keyword linking to pages you’re trying to rank can produce amazing results!
In the blow up doll website example, let’s say we have a keyword phrase “doll puncture repair kit” and a page we want to rank in the search engines. We set up link Daemon so that every time the phrase “doll puncture repair kit” is mentioned anywhere on the site, a link to that page will appear.
Repeat this for all your keywords and over time you have a huge internal keyword link network.
Internal links are very relevant. Don’t ignore them!
I also like the Yet Another Related Posts Plug-in, which gives the reader a list of related posts that they can then read on the site.
That’s pretty much all I do to get things up and running. In the next post I’ll talk about content, back linking and setting up the site to sell.
cheers,
Danny
This post is the fourth in the series by Danny Batelic, who runs a popular How to Sell Websites Blog. If you want to learn how to renovate aged domains and sell them online, visit Trading Websites Blog
Hi Danny,
Thanks for the helpful post but where do I get the Link Daemon plugin? I went to the RSS Bomber sales page but there’s no mention of Link Daemon anywhere there.
Thanks!
Be More,
Andy Iskandar
Hi Andy,
Sorry, the Link Daemon plugin comes as a bonus with another of Dan Raine’s plugins, Silo, which I also use on all my sites these days.
You can get here http://www.wordpresssiloplugin.com if you’re interested.
None of these links are affiliate, just great tools that I like to use.
If you’re starting out, you can certainly get by without having to spend money on this stuff. I waited until I had some money in the bank after a few sales before I started buying any of these tools.
The tension is driving me….well…ok…I’ll wait.
Check your text though…..some words missing
Peter, I think Danny just gets a bit excited!
ooops, I did get a little excited with this post!
Great post. My only question is, when are you guys going to fix DomainFace so people can actually find expiring domains instead of a bunch of “unavailable” domains that can’t be registered?
You guys keep pumping out blog posts for a product that doesn’t work.
Hi Tom,
we’ve been integrating dropped domain names in the database as an additional feature. As you have noticed it requires a bit more work and as a result we are scaling this feature back to prevent users like yourself having a problem finding available domain names.
No need to pay for Link Daemon as there are free versions available.
How much is RSS Bomber?
Danny the beginning of your statement was very powerful. I would like to share with you how the GURU is able to do this and how actually…we make them poorer when we buy.
How is Link Daemon different than Buoyant PageRank plugin that is available with WPD?
Danny
Loving your series so far. I had, like, a Trifecta of factors swirl together (of which you were one) which said I should be using WordPressDirect, but honestly their system is rather confusing and misfunctional.
The biggest one so far is that if making a new POST through the typical /wp-admin of my site (which was installed with WPD) there is an error when trying to insert an image into the post. I even found other people on WPD’s question boards having the exact same problem (the details of which I wont get into here)…. but suffice to say, I am getting rather discouraged from using WPD, especially paying for it after the free trial is over.
What this comes down to is this: Do you recommend using WPD on a website for a business I plan on owning and running long-term? I understand WPD may be good for an auto-content-generated site, in order that it simply gets traffic, and has advertising offers on it for monetization, and then you can sell it – but that is not what Im trying to do right now. I am trying to build a website for my actual business that I want to keep and ofcourse rank, with my own content etc….
thanks
Jesse
Jesse,
I do recommend wpdirect, but it’s not essential. I like it for it’s ability to easily manage multiple sites.
If you’re wanting to run just one site, a wordpress blog is all you need.
WordPress direct isn’t the only way to do things, it just helps setup and manage multiple sites.
Hi Dave,
They are both similar, but I prefer the more control you have with Link Daemon.
I started using link daemon before I upgraded to the more expensive WPD plan (Buoyant PageRank is only available with their gold and platinum plans) and I really prefer the level of control I get with Link Daemon, but I do like Buoyant PageRank.
its really fascinating tools, make more easy to research and search what we need
Exactly!
“I always make sure my sites are hosted on good cpanel hosts that haven’t been modified by the hosting company.”
Can you recommend any such companies in Australia?
Harry,
Are you wanting to host .com.au sites? If not, any of the us ones are fine. If you want to host .com.au sites, just do a local google search, as there are new hosting sites popping up every day.
Just check with them that they offer unmodified cpanel accounts.
Danny
Getting ansy for your next post in the series!
Jesse
Hi Jesse,
just finishing the next one today
Danny
Still looking for that next post! (unless I just didnt get an email notification for it)
Also, how do I tell if a domain I bought has been blacklisted by Google? I bought a domain name awhile ago from buydomains.com, I did the 10 points of domain analysis according to Kenny on the Market Samurai blog, and everything looked fine, but in the past two months even affter using traffic-bug and pinging and submitting a sitemap through the Google Webmaster Tools page, they still havent indexed anything.
More importantly, assuming it has been blacklisted by Google, how do I go about getting it un-blacklisted? quickest ways you know of?
thanks
Jesse
Hi Jesse,
New post should be up soon.
This might help with your site issues
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=40052
Danny
Also, what do you recommend in the way of submitting all those RSS feeds??? all those feeds created by RSSBOMBER???
Any auto/semi-auto tools you recommend???
Jesse
Jess,
I use a manual process where I have a growing list of directories that I post the feeds into.
I speed it up a little by bookmarking each page in my browser and then opening them all and going through them one at time.
I now really speed it up by paying someone to do it for me, but when I was doing it myself it was a 30min job a few times a week and well worth the effort.
Any suggestions on where to find good people to outsource these small projects to?
Tried mechanical turk -Ugh! now at fiver – a bit better quality – any inside scoops you want to share?? Thanks,
Hi Rose, I use oDesk myself. They have a great time tracking system so you can really keep tabs on the people you hire. They’re particularly good for helping you feel confident when paying by the hour. I’ve used freelancer.com before for writers with good results, and rentacoder.com is great for outsourcing software projects to. Mechanical Turk is better for tasks involving validation, classification and information gathering.