Sherb
Ban reason = Abuse of Mods
- Dec 26, 2010
- 1,968
- 18,138
"It'll take me all day just to read this!"
"Yoast is a waste of time, use your head instead."
"This will never pass as a legitimate brand."
"[X] is a better idea than [Y]."
...I don't give a shit.
This monstrosity is the second installment in my https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/1-000-posts-for-me-12-months-of-life-changing-threads-for-you-do-more-be-better-build-wealth.967093/ promise.
If you are looking for the first one, https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/becoming-effective-part-1-using-a-morning-routine-to-compound-productivity-and-do-more-faster.973321/, it's linked right there.
HIGH LEVEL STRUCTURE OF THIS THREAD
HOUR ONE - BRAINSTORMING, DOMAINING, AND BACKEND WORK
Finding your perfect brand name and keyword set
Buying your domain, hosting, and WhoIs protection
Configuring your site in your Managed Wordpress Hosting
HOUR TWO - BASIC WORDPRESS SETUP AND BRANDING
Getting your new Wordpress theme going properly
Trashing most of the clutter and setting up a clean homepage
Gathering images and making them your own, uploading to the site
HOUR THREE - MORE ADVANCED BRANDING PROCESSES AND CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
Gathering images for your team and testimonials
Adding in new images, making the home page unique and branded
Trashing more of the cluttered mess
HOUR FOUR - PLUGINS AND MORE CONTENT WRITING
Adding plugins and pages to your website
Configuring the pre-filled (mostly) site pages (Contact, TOS, Privacy)
Configuring the Resources page from previously published posts
Configuring the Services page properly based on services offered
HOUR FIVE - EVEN MORE CONTENT WRITING
Adding and configuring your About page
Adding in your menus and getting them set up properly
Finding, spinning, SEO’ing, and posting a standard blog post
Quickly developing a custom, free placeholder logo for your brand
HOUR SIX - YOUR GOOD FRIEND GOOGLE
Creating a new Google account as a catch-all for your new brand
Setting up your Google My Business and About Me pages
Setting up Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools for your website
Building a Google+ page for your brand
Development and configuration of a YouTube page for your brand
HOUR SEVEN - FURTHER SOCIAL MEDIA DIVES + AUTOMATION
Creating a new Twitter account and setting it up
Creating a Facebook business page and configuring it properly
Developing an Instagram account for your business
Connecting Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ with Hootsuite
HOUR EIGHT - WRAPPING EVERYTHING UP
Final site edits and configurations
Ten things to take your next steps up
Suggested services from BHW to amp up your brand
INTRODUCTION
In our industry, proper branding is frequently seen as what separates success from failure. “Branding” in itself is a wide-ranging term, but for our sake we are going to define it in this thread as such:
“A solid online presence, and the appearance of being an authority in your product or service niche."
It can take months to truly build a solid brand for what it is that you do. Especially when you start from literal square one. But we are going to get a solid base going in one eight-hour day. That’s right, we are BUILDING A BRAND IN A DAY (yeah, I’m trying to rank for this keyword). It may take longer, you may get done faster. But you should be able to knock out the things in this thread in one solid workday.
This thread requires you to have three things:
Note: This is being done in the US, and prices are in US dollars. Links to sign up for things may be different in your country. Your mileage may vary. Copyright 2017. All rights reserved. Etc etc.
Also Note: I’m sure there are parts of this guide that you know a better workaround for. Your method may be faster or more efficient. I don’t care. This was developed for those who are looking for a start to finish option. This is that. I’d love to hear suggestions, though, for speeding up this process. This is geared towards newer members. Members who may have done some of these pieces, but never truly put them together into one solid package. I’m sure there are plenty of you who have done all of these steps, and probably quite a few who can do them faster and better than I can.
I’m going to do this along with you, including several steps along the way to make things much easier of a process for you, and to save you significant time. Let’s dive into BUILDING A BRAND IN A DAY:
HOUR ONE - BRAINSTORMING, DOMAINING, AND BACKEND WORK
Note: My SSL is screwing up on me. Disregard the fact that my website does not have https for the time being.
Spend sixty seconds brainstorming a name. Literally, set a timer and write down as many names as you can think of. Aim for ten. After the timer goes off, cross out all but your favorite three. Google the brand name in quotes to see if it’s taken. Be smart about this. For mine, there is an area near me called Ponte Vedra Beach. It’s a very wealthy town right on the ocean. I’d like to give local SEO a go in that area, and I’m going to be easy about it and call my brand “Ponte Vedra Beach SEO”.
But Sherbs, doesn’t that really cut down the number of possible customers? Yeah it does. But guess what? If you’re selling $2,000 per month full SEO packages, you only need three or four to make a solid income online.
If you don’t have a name settled on and researched after ten minutes you are doing something wrong. Maybe you thought ahead and already know what you want your brand to be called. Good for you.
Now go to Namecheap. You can use other providers, but I like Namecheap for both domains and hosting, so I’m using them. If you have an account logged in, log out. Find your site name. Dot com always reigns supreme, but dot-net and dot-org work if need be. Dot-io makes you look tech-y if you feel like taking the hipster route.
http://Pontevedrabeachseo.com wasn’t taken, but that’s a long brand name. I went for PVBSEO.com. Six letters, beautiful, not taken. Added to the cart, and also added in PositiveSSL to get that legitimate HTTPS look. Total price is $11.05. I could put it on one of my current hosting accounts, but we are starting from scratch here. Don’t buy it yet.
Namecheap has one-site managed Wordpress hosting for $8.88 for the first year https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/managed-wordpress.aspx. Buy that first. It’ll take you right into the login area. Make an account.
Choose a domain from Namecheap when you are prompted. It’ll take you to the home page. Guess what? Your stuff is still in the cart. Go to the cart, make sure all is set (that free Whois protection for the first year is killer). Confirm order and fill out the contact information. On the next screen make sure WhoisGuard Privacy Protection is checked. Hit continue again.
Pay with the same card. Then everything processes. You should have a bunch of emails now. Go to your EasyWP dashboard. You in? Choose your domain you just bought. Show advanced options. Pick a nice theme. I chose Optimizer. Note that you can scroll down to see more themes. Want to make the rest of this guide super easy to follow? Do what I do exactly. Hit create, wait a few seconds, and hit confirm.
While that sets up, go back to your email. You may have one regarding immediate verification of contact details. Click that link to verify your email address. While the Wordpress finishes installing, let’s sit back and marvel at how, within 30 minutes (or less), and for just under $20, you have managed Wordpress hosting, a branded domain, Whois protection, and SSL for a year.
Are there easier ways? Sure. Are there cheaper ways? Absolutely. You could grab a Blogspot site and an XYZ domain for less than a dollar. But remember, we are going for a bulletproof brand, and we are doing this in eight hours. We are BUILDING A BRAND IN A DAY. After a few minutes, you should be set up. Click the three menu dots and check out your new site. Not working? Mine wasn’t either. DNS is still probably churning. No matter. You’ve got other tasks to attend to in the meantime. Go into your EasyWP site settings. See the spots to upload an SSL certificate and a Private Key? Let’s go find them to get your SSL fully set up. This is the most technical step of this whole process.
Go to your https://ap.www.namecheap.com/ProductList/SslCertificates on Namecheap. You should see a certificate that needs to be activated. There it is! Hit activate. We don’t want to go through the CSR request process, as we are on a time schedule, so instead we go https://decoder.link/csr_generator. Fill that out, CHECK YOUR WWW VS NON-WWW, then copy the certificate and private key somewhere. Post the CSR into the box back in your SSL Activate tab. It’ll grab your domain. Set your server type and activate. Then hit next. Choose the DNS-based DCV method. Put NA for the company name on the next screen. Then fill out whatever you’d like on the rest (use real information, remember, you’re a bulletproof brand builder now). On the next step, hit confirm. It will initiate the SSL certificate, and move the status to IN PROGRESS.
Now look at the line for DCV Methods In Use. See the EDIT METHODS dropdown? Click that. Then click Get Record. Go to a new tab and get to your https://ap.www.namecheap.com/. Go to your domain details, and the Advanced DNS tab. Now let’s add a new CNAME record. Copy and paste the Host and Target from the other tab and save it.
Now we wait a little bit. If you run into issues, there’s live chat always available, which is nice. They are usually competent and quick to solve most issues. Shortly, it should go from IN PROGRESS to ISSUED. Once that happens, go to the dropdown for See Details and download the certificate ZIP file.
HOUR TWO - BASIC WORDPRESS SETUP AND BRANDING
Get into your Wordpress dashboard and go to Appearance > Themes. Install and activate a theme called Allegiant. Once you do that, delete the other theme(s). You don’t need them cluttering your database.
You’ll notice a big orange notification icon with About Allegiant. Click that. Install and activate, download and import everything they recommend. This takes a few minutes. Now check out your home page. Pretty beautiful, right? Here’s my above the fold. Yours should look similar:
Get it? Got it? Now let’s gut it. Go to Posts > All Posts. Delete them all, and empty the trash. Go to Posts > Categories, and delete those as well. Do the same for Posts > Tags. I told you, we are gutting. Now go to Pages > All Pages and delete everything. I bet that feels reckless.
Now you’ve got a relatively clean slate except for the home page. Let’s gut some of that, too. Here are the current sections: Navigation bar, slider, features, custom tagline, portfolio, what is offered, testimonials, some random logos, a team section, the now empty blog section, and the footer. Let’s cut out the custom tagline, portfolio, random logos and footer garbage.
Go to Clients > Clients and move everything to the trash. Empty that trash out. Now go to Media > Media Library. See those nine white logo images? Highlight them and trash them. While you’re in there, delete the six portfolio images that can be found on the home page. In fact, you can delete all the media items in there except background-forest, slide 1, and slide 2. It’ll look like this when you’re done gutting:
Isn’t that refreshing and minimal? Remember, these can always be changed later. But for now, we are… BUILDING A BRAND IN A DAY.
Now go to Portfolio > Portfolio and delete everything, then empty the trash. Now go to Customize > Layout > Homepage and remove the tagline text to get the custom tagline to disappear. Save and publish. Go to your Widgets and remove the footer widgets that are there (there will be something in all three). Beautiful.
Now it’s time for me to do some background research for you and save you some time. Your slider images on the home page are sized at 1903x801. Your background image is 1903x1070. You are going to need four team member images that are 315x315, and three testimonial images that are probably around 200x200. We are also going to grab some blog featured images while we are batching tasks together. Let’s say five of them, all somewhat related, with a planned size of 1500x500.
Go to Pexels. I love Pexels, as they are simple, and the images are large and high quality. This is where we will get our background, slider, and post images. Find something nice for the background. This is what I grabbed: https://static.pexels.com/photos/32237/pexels-photo.jpg. Name it something relevant when saving. In going with the minimal space approach for the slider images, I grabbed the following two: https://static.pexels.com/photos/37728/pexels-photo-37728.jpeg and https://static.pexels.com/photos/108601/pexels-photo-108601.jpeg. And then the five post images in typical hipster fashion:
https://static.pexels.com/photos/106344/pexels-photo-106344.jpeg
https://static.pexels.com/photos/196655/pexels-photo-196655.jpeg
https://static.pexels.com/photos/163130/keyboard-black-notebook-input-163130.jpeg
https://static.pexels.com/photos/34676/pexels-photo.jpg
https://static.pexels.com/photos/374016/pexels-photo-374016.jpeg
Now for some image editing to make them “your own”. I’m a fan of black and white with random small pops of color. I use it in most of my sites, and this is going to be no exception. So here is my process for the five post images first: Resize the width to 1500, crop the height to 500, make the color black and white, pop into compressjpeg.com, download the compressed versions, upload to the Media Library. Here is my end result:
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/pvb-seo-post-5-min.jpeg
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/pvb-seo-post-4-min.jpg
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/pvb-seo-post-3-min.jpeg
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/pvb-seo-post-2-min.jpeg
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/pvb-seo-post-1-min.jpeg
The background and slider images I will do a similar process to, except I will leave the background image at the color scheme it is. The sizes will be 1903x801 for the slider images and 1903x1070 for the background image. Here are the end results of that:
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ponte-vedra-beach-seo-background-min.jpg
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/pvb-seo-slider-1-min.jpeg
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/pvb-seo-slider-2-min.jpeg
With the crop and color change, as well as file name change, Google will likely see these all as original (except for the background image). Which doesn’t really matter. None of that does. Moving on to the pictures of people now.
Here is how I grab my placeholder team member images: Go to a random law firm website and grab a few of their related looking team member images. By random I mean random. Here is what I came up with by searching “omaha nebraska law firms”, clicking on a link in the middle of the second page, going to their team page, and selecting the letter D: https://www.koleyjessen.com/team?do_item_search=1&letter=D#form-search-results
It just so happens I need four of them, and there are four on that page. So nice of them to make the images transparent PNG’s as well. I went to each team member page and downloaded the images as team#.png, 1 to 4. I resized to 315x315, flipped them all horizontally, made them all black and white, ran them through compresspng.com, and uploaded to the Media Library. Here is my end result:
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/team4-min.png
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/team3-min.png
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/team2-min.png
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/team1-min.png
And I went ahead and went to the M’s on that same law firm site and grabbed three of them and did the same process for the testimonials, just sized at 200x200. Here’s that end result:
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/testimonial3-min.png
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/testimonial2-min.png
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/testimonial1-min.png
Beautiful. Why did I not just leave the team/testimonial images as they were on the demo. Because we’re our own brand, not a demo. If your potential clients are smart enough to think to reverse image search your team pictures, they are going to quickly find that they’re demo-side, and the hundreds of other sites using the exact same pictures. If they reverse image search there, they’re clean. As long as you guys don’t copy my exact process. Please don’t.
Now if you go to your homepage, there are nice orange EDIT buttons everywhere. Go ahead and replace the images in your team, testimonials, and slider with your new images. Or save a little time by going through the Team Members, Testimonials and Slides section on your Wordpress dashboard. You can also change the background image through Customize > General Theme Options > Background Image. Now you can go into your Media Library and delete the last three images from the demo theme.
That’s a wrap for the second hour. For hour three we take this home page, add our own content, and create a nice logo set for ourselves as well.
HOUR THREE - MORE ADVANCED BRANDING PROCESSES AND CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
Alright, time to crack down. There are several text areas of the home page: Slider 1, Slider 2, The “Features” section with three sub sections, the “offerings” section with three subsections, three testimonials, four team members, and the footer. For god’s sake, never forget the footer. Let’s make these our own.
Start filling that stuff out. I suggest starting with the testimonials and team section. For inspiration, Google around, steal the content of others and then spin it to your own liking and wording. Here’s a way to get solid testimonial examples quickly: https://www.google.com/search?q=seo+testimonials+examples.
I went here first: https://shannonksteffen.com/client-testimonials/. Here are the first three testimonials:
“Shannon was an extremely valuable asset as we worked to grown in our understanding of SEO best practices and how we could implement them on our website in an efficient manner. She is a fantastic teacher and very well-versed in her areas of expertise!”
“I am thrilled with the work Shannon did with the SEO for my website. Shannon took a concept that was confusing to me, and made it easy to understand. She gave our team actionable tips, and we are seeing results! Shannon's comprehensive program, along with her delightful personality, make SEO fun!”
“Anyone looking for the Swiss Army knife of search engine optimization (SEO), web design and social media program execution need look no further then Shannon Steffen. Shannon possesses a broad perspective as well as the experience to execute projects from kick-off to go-live. I look forward to collaborating with Shannon again soon.”
Here they are with my own spin on them to make them my own:
“Ponte Vendra Beach SEO was an extremely valuable asset as we developed into growing to understand our business’ own best practices for search optimization.”
“We were thrilled with the work Ponte Vedra Beach SEO did to both our website and our entire online brand. They took confusing concepts and made them simple.”
“Anybody on the lookout for a Swiss Army knife of search engine optimization, web development, and social media management need look no further than PVB SEO.”
Short and sweet and to the point. We don’t want to clutter the home page with filler. As I added in the new information in the testimonials to replace the lorem ipsum text, I used http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/ to grab new names to use. The end result is quite nice:
Here was my source for grabbing team information to spin: https://www.google.com/search?num=40&q=meet+our+team+seo. One of them is going to be based on me, so the other three needed to be added in. Here was the link I settled on: https://www.1stonthelist.ca/company/meet-our-seo-team/. And here were the three I grabbed initially:
"Tony loves coffee, music and writing. With nearly 2 decades of content optimization experience, he’s well versed in everything SEO. Tony has worked with clients from virtually every industry making him the proverbial “Jack of all Trades.” From developing in depth content strategies and consulting with clients to creative and technical writing plus website design coaching, Tony is one of our client’s most valuable resources. Tony’s love for the creative extends to writing his own music, performing with his band and producing multi-media charitable fundraisers.”
"Angela is the technical brains behind implementing backend source code and tweaking websites just so. Often times her work isn’t visible to the untrained eye but is definitely noticeable in terms of traffic increases and improved site performance. Eager to learn the newest trends in SEO including recent Microdata Markup, Rich Snippet Integration and Open Graph Protocol, Angela is always going the extra mile for all her clients. Angela worked in our head office for 3 ½ years but now telecommutes since she and her family opted for the low key island life and made the move across the waters to Vancouver Island. Flipping houses with her husband is also one of her passions.”
"Robin has been designing website since she was 12 years old when she thought to herself that web design couldn’t be that difficult. Initially self-taught Robin has a natural knack for designing in WordPress and helping clients create websites that are user friendly, attractive and Search Engine friendly. She loves websites that have great design and clean code. Since joining our team in 2010 Robin has not only designed websites but has also implemented client training for updating their own websites, mobile friendly website design plus security plans. When Robin isn’t in the office she is at the stables with her daughter and her horse Ruby.”
Those are way too long for our home page, so here are my condensations and rewrites:
“Mark loves music, writing, hiking and good-quality coffee. With over twenty solid years of content optimization experience under his belt, he has been in the SEO game since the beginning.”
“Cynthia is the technical brains behind the implementation of backend code and website tweaking. While her work may not be visible, there is no doubting its need.”
“Wanda has been developing websites since she was eleven years old. Self taught, she has a knack for Wordpress design, and can be found assisting clients in their design needs.”
The end result of that for my brand example is as such:
Here is my new text for the sliders:
Slider 1: We have a stellar track record of assisting our customers and clients reach a broader audience and increase both profitability and return on investment | Take your business to the mainstream with PVB SEO.
Slider 2: Whether a small business or individual brand, we grow your search presence with a creative blend of innovative concepts | Fully optimized SEO solutions for businesses.
For the features and offerings section, I highly suggest keeping things very short, and utilizing different feature icons as found when you go to edit the individual items. I went quickly and the sales copy is not the best, but I attributed three of the main facets of SEO (website, social media, links) to parts of the circulatory system as such:
Pardon the terrible choice in icons, too. I free-wrote the services offered, edited the icons as well, and ended up with the following:
I’m pleased with the final result. I try to keep exact offerings vague, as if this ever turns from a demo into actual SEO customers locally, I want to be able to have completely dynamic campaigns dependent on the needs of the customer. One of the things learned from serious reputation management for years.
Now go to Customize > Layout, and alter the text a bit on the following sections: Features, Services, Team Members, and Testimonials. For me, "Our core features” became "Our Three-Part Focus”. "What we can offer you” became "PVB SEO's Offerings”. "Meet our team” became “Meet Our Motley Crew”. "What they say about us” became "Things We've Been Told”. While you are still in Customizer, go to Widgets, Default Widgets, and remove Recent Comments, Meta, the CPO Widgets, and the second Recent Comments.
Now go to Appearance > Editor > footer.php and remove the following lines:
<div class="container">
<?php do_action('cpotheme_footer'); ?>
</div>
This removes the attribution from the Wordpress theme. Granted, now there’s a gray box with a single white line, but we will take care of that in the last hour when we polish everything up.
At this point, congratulations, you’ve made the home page your own. In hour four, we are going to add some sub pages so prospective customers can see more about you, can check out your terms of service and privacy policy, and can contact you. In hour five we are going to finish that up and spin one quick but informative post.
HOUR FOUR - PLUGINS AND MORE CONTENT WRITING
Alright, time to install some plugins. Go to the plugin installed and set up/activate the following Wordpress plugins:
Looking for a way to speed this up? Install all five from the Plugin search sections, and then go to the Plugins > Installed Plugins page and check them all off and activate all five at once. Skip and dismiss everything, and you should be on the screen for Auto Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Go ahead and fill the fields out, making sure to change from Off/Coming Soon to On/Displaying.
You should see the following available shortcodes:
For TOS and Privacy, paste in your shortcodes as text, not visual. Then publish the two pages and check the formatting and ensure the data propagated properly. I then like to go ahead and put some custom Yoast meta titles and descriptions with these pages. Here’s what I added in:
For the Contact page, paste in your third shortcode ([contact-form-7 id="3675" title="Contact form 1”]) and then above the shortcode put in text similar to the following, filling in the blanks as you go:
[BRAND] is dedicated to providing you with the highest quality [SERVICE SUMMARY] services available. While operating local [SERVICE] out of the [LOCATION] area, we also have a dedicated branch focused on offering our [SERVICE SUMMARY] services to a broader, online-focused audience.
If you are interested in finding out more information about our process, would like to get in touch with us for a potential project, or just have a question, comment, or concern for our team, we urge you to fill out the contact form below. [BRAND] will respond to your inquiry in 24 hours or less. Thanks!
[contact-form-7 id="3675" title="Contact form 1”]
If you have better copy, go for it. I’m just trying to take some of the work time out of your schedule for this. I also went ahead and put one of those five black and white images up on the Contact page, leaving me with four remaining. Again, put in some clever meta information by editing the snippet in the Yoast section immediately below the text box:
The next page, Resources, I’m going to cheat on. As it is SEO based, I looked up a list of the “best SEO blogs” and found a pretty good one that didn’t include Charles Floate here: https://www.digitalauthority.me/insights/best-digital-marketing-blogs-2017-25-06-2017. I copied their list, pasted it into my Resources page, and removed the images. I’m not going for originality at the moment, just speed. When I pasted, the formatting stayed and the links stayed as well. Double bonus. I suggest you do the same with your niche. Or if you feel white hat, write your own. Or don’t include this page at all. I don’t care.
Remember, we are building a brand in a day. After the one day, feel free to go back and revise and upgrade anything you’d like. I popped a clever meta title and description onto that page as well:
Two pages to go. Time for Services. That’s the biggie. Guess what? While the home page might be cryptic, the Services page is actually going to have a listing of services offered by this brand. And guess what else? Since this is a live brand and site, if someone actually orders one of my services, I am going to deliver. So what do I plan to offer? I’m going to resell services from https://www.thehoth.com/welcome/?newuser=1&. This is a pretty common thing that a lot of SEO services do… especially some of the white label services floating around this site. I plan to offer upsold versions of all of their services except for their reputation management software, editorial posts, and tier 2 garbage.
But how to make this appear original? By putting the hammer down and getting some writing done. Want to increase the speed that this page is completed, while offering a similar solution? Spin my copy. But I do mean spin it. If I Google my sentences from my Services page and find carbon copies out there, I will find out who you are and out you extremely fast. So here is my copy:
http://pvbseo.com/services/
I would paste it in here, but I don’t think you guys want to sit through 1,800 more words. I included links to the Contact page with call to action copy after each service option provided. I also set the Layout Options to be full width, removing the blog-style sidebar. The rest of the pages can have the sidebar, but for this I want to focus to be on the services we offer. I also edited the meta title and description via Yoast for this page as well:
Again, feel free to spin my spin. Feel free to make your own based on the product or service you are offering. Whatever you need to do. But for this project, this is the page that will drive rankings more than any other. I’m sure doing so will take the remainder of the fourth hour, so we will move straight into Hour Five.
HOUR FIVE - EVEN MORE CONTENT WRITING
And this leaves the About page. Aim for over 300 words with this. We are going to be doing a lot of writing this hour. Here is a good place to look for inspiration: https://www.google.com/search?q=seo+services+about+us. Again, spin spin spin. If you’re wanting this to be your own true brand, then you already know the “About Us”. Write it. If you think it might sound bad, run it through Grammarly and Hemingway and see what those tools say.
I decided to spin the About section of Coalition Technologies to fit my needs. Here is the original: https://coalitiontechnologies.com/who-we-are/. There is some serious garbage in there at the beginning, but the meat of it is alright, and spinnable to meet my needs.
Here is my take on it:
The Ponte Vedra Beach Search Engine Optimization team is small yet mighty. Our presence is local but our reach is global. Our leadership is committed to providing a stellar working environment for employees, as well as opportunities to better themselves and their customers. By hiring only the best of the best, and then encouraging consistent improvement from there, Ponte Vedra Beach SEO provides an unrivaled value to the customer.
We don’t operate as a traditional marketing company or public relations firm. Ponte Vedra Beach SEO does not put any focus onto traditional media and print marketing. Our team is completely dedicated to the immense power of online marketing. The results generated for businesses and individual compared to physical alternatives has a far stronger positive affect on ROI.
Ponte Vedra Beach SEO is dedicated to providing the strongest search engine strategies and out-of-the-box black hat and white hat optimization methods you will find anywhere in the First Coast area. Our team is capable of stretching into the realms of email marketing, social media management, and mobile engagement with ease, with a high level of professionalism and expertise that reaches the far corners of Internet marketing.
Our team members are a think tank, and a beacon of light in a sea of darkness that is “the same old SEO company offering the same old stuff”. We have a combined service load of hundreds of total clients, and a combined search engine optimization experience of almost a century. Our client retention rate is over 95%, and we have never left a client unsatisfied.
Created in late 2017 as a combination of multiple freelancers, Ponte Vedra Beach SEO is dedicated to developing a stronger knowledge and push of the SEO game across not only Ponte Vedra, but also surrounding areas and beyond. We act local, but think global.
Simple, to the point, straightforward, and fast. Is this a final version? Absolutely not. I’m sure in future days, not just day one, I would expand this greatly, add subsections, etc. This would be the case for all pages. But for a start, and on the first day, it will do. I also went ahead and put one of those five black and white images up on the About page, leaving me with three remaining.
Then, of course, give it a snazzy custom meta title and description:
Once that is published, you should have six solid pages of content. Time to put a completed menu up on your header, now. Go to Appearance > Menus. In the Select a menu to edit dropdown, select Main. Select all pages and add them. I put them in this order: About, Services, Contact, Resources, TOS, Privacy. Then check off Display Location as Main Menu. Save and check out your home page to see how it looks:
That’s acceptable. Check and make sure all the pages go to the right place. They should by default, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. All good? Good. Go back to Menus. We are going to make a placeholder social menu while we are here.
Select Top as the menu name. On the left, go to the dropdown for Custom Links. Add links for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Set the link URL’s as “#” for now. Set as the Top menu and save, then check out how that looks. Not bad:
We can make changes to that in the last hour if we feel like it when we polish things up. Now let’s do some more writing.
Find yourself one article on an SEO blog. I like to Google “SEO Blog” and go back to page 20 or so. Look for something around 400-600 words. “But Sherbs, longform content is better, you always preach that.” Yeah, I know I do. But we are building a brand in a day. There will be plenty of time for longform articles and content on content on content in the future of your brand.
Here is an okay one I found:
https://www.rankmagic.com/dont-use-keywords-meta-tag/
So, let’s spin this shall we?
I’m changing the title to "Keywords meta tag: useless for SEO” and starting a new post. The URL that propagates is too long for my tastes, so I change the slug to keywords-meta-tag. Then I paste the current article and spin it. This takes me about 15 minutes. Might take you more, might take you less.
Here is article one, rewritten (this took me exactly 11 minutes and is 582 words… the wonder of spinning content that already exists):
It boggles our minds that there are still people out there working in search engine optimization who utilize the keywords meta tag. This is not a post that should even need to be written. This tag has been defunct and relatively useless for SEO for several years. Yet still, websites that are proudly developed by "prestige and professional" SEO firms are still using elaborate, excessive meta keyword tagging.
Here is a little bit of history for those who might be confused as to why this is a useless feature and a waste of time in current search engine optimization practice:
The concept of the"meta tag" began to be utilized over twenty years ago. Long before Google came to be the search titan that it is today. Search engines such as AskJeeves, InfoSeek, Lycos, and AltaVista reigned supreme. Elder, more seasoned SEO professionals were advising their clients that the keywords meta tag, stating "The keywords meta tag was developed to help search engines to know what a page was trying to rank for". This was back in the early days, when SEO was a process that could be easily replicated and was relatively static. No more.
Twenty years ago, popular search terms were vastly different compared to what they are today. At that time, one of the most popular search engine terms input by users was "Britney Spears". For some owners of the precursor sites to the concept of "going viral", this was a compelling opportunity. Their theory was, that if millions upon millions of people were searching this term, why not add this tag to our own website in the keywords meta tag? Then these millions of people would be pushed to our site instead, and surely some of those would want to buy what we have to offer!
So they did so. They added that term and many other popular terms, albeit completely unrelated, to their keywords meta tag to try and fool search engines into sending traffic their way. This was in the days where excess was king. They would add the tag multiple times, shoved between other tags, capitalized, lowercase, and more.
It wasn't much longer after this started occurring with reckless abandon that search engines began to take notice. They spotted these sketchy tactics quickly, and started treating sites that did this as "search engine spam". The result of this was that these advanced search engines completely stopped using the keyword meta tag to rank websites, opting instead for ridiculously advanced custom algorithms. Ever since this happened, many many years ago, the keywords meta tag became worthless.
However, these legends and myths die a very brutal death. As recently as 2008, Matt Cutts was forced to publish a video thoroughly explaining that Google definitely does NOT utilize the keywords meta tag at all in the ranking of their websites. Other search giants Bing and Yahoo have seconded this notion. They represent almost all of the search share in developed countries, and prove that this meta tag will not help your site at all in ranking higher in searches.
What's even worse is that a keywords meta tag in your website's code may be seen as a spam signal from search engines, a desperate attempt to fool them into search rankings better than you earned. This isn't blackhat. This is just plain bad decision making and poor search engine optimization skills. This tag will hurt your ranks more than help them. Please stop using it.
-Ponte Vedra Beach SEO team
I’ll be honest… I think if my article and the original came out at the same time on sites with identical metrics, mine would rank better. Just saying.
I add an awesome meta setup:
Added a focus keyword in the Yoast panel of "keywords meta tag”, and added an internal and external link as instructed (internal link in a one-line CTA I added), as well as a black and white post image with “keywords meta tag” as the alt tag. And would you look at that:
That’s what I like to see. I added a new category called Search Engine Optimization, and then tags of seo, keywords meta tag, and search engine optimization, and published. Here it is: http://pvbseo.com/2017/10/25/keywords-meta-tag/
And this does it for new content we will be adding to the site. Go to your homepage and scroll to the bottom. You should see your post there, with populated information in the sidebar now for Archives, Recent Posts, Categories, and Tags. Go team.
Let’s round out the hour by making yourself a fancy, quick logo. This is absolutely temporary, and I highly suggest getting an actual logo made by someone if you aren’t a designer in your own right. I have used services from Fiverr to some degree of success, but @whiteblackseo on here does wonderful work, faster and less expensive than the Fiverr alternatives. Highly recommended.
We are going to use Adobe Spark for this. Go here: https://spark.adobe.com/make/logo-maker/.
Click “Create your own logo now”. You should get some brown looking Cafe Adrian thing. Go to layout, and I suggest for the website header logo to change it to banner size. Play around with things for a little bit. It’s pretty intuitive.
When you have your logo how you like it, click Share, and then Download. Boom, logo. Don’t quit out of it yet. Go back to your logo, Go to Layout > Resize, and make it square. Then mess with the text until it’s not tiny if yours got small. Share, and download. Now go and rename your files. I called mine ponte-vedra-beach-seo-header and ponte-vedra-beach-seo-square. Before we close out the hour, let’s pop your header logo into the site to see how it looks.
Go to Customize, then General Theme Options > Site Identity. Set a title and tagline (because that’s what shows in your browser tab). Then upload your new logo. Don’t like what you see? Then you’re probably like me. There’s an option to have a text title. Do that. There’s plenty of time to get things how you want them. We can focus on the overall branding graphics wise on the social media pages and Google stuff. Which we will start right now!
HOUR SIX - YOUR GOOD FRIEND GOOGLE
Alright, guys. This is where things start progressing brand-wise. See that square logo? You’re going to use that. See your background image? That will be utilized as well as a header image for now. Again, these can ALWAYS be changed.
Go to http://knowem.com and pop in your company name, as short as possible, to see what username combinations are available. You can also just try to search for the URL. Check combinations and see what’s up. Now you’re going to register some social media sites. Just a few. We don’t have all day here. The hours are almost over.
But stop! Before you do anything else, start a new Gmail account. https://accounts.google.com/SignUp will get you there probably. Make the name your business name. I was able to get [email protected] too. That’s great.
Once you create your account, you’ll be in your main My Account section. Go to Personal Info and Privacy > Your personal info. Verify your phone number if you have the capacity to do so. Then click About Me, and you’ll be to aboutme.google.com. Wonderful. Add your square logo as the profile image, and the background image from your site as the header image.
Here is where it gets important. Go here: https://www.google.com/business/. Click Start Now. Then fill in your business information. Options for addresses: Fake address that you can’t get manually approved, UPS (or foreign equivalent) box that you buy and use as an address (PO boxes don’t work), your actual office or storefront address, or your home address. I’d use my home address, but not only am I not in Ponte Vedra Beach, I don’t want you guys knowing exactly where I live.
So guess what? There’s a UPS Store at 1000 Pga Tour Blvd, Ponte Vedra Beach, FL 32082. I’m putting that in for now. I’ll update this thread later if I decide to move forward with my business listing and get a real UPS box there.
Phone number? If you don’t have a local phone number of where you are, go here: https://voice.google.com/u/0/about. Connect your phone to it (oh no Google will have my info… shut up). Or don’t. Put in a fake number. I don’t care. The more legit, the more legitimate your brand will appear right off the bat.
Enter your category and website URL, and let ‘er rip. Once you progress, you’ll see why it’s important to have a real address. Your listing won’t go “live” on Google Local (at least not in the US) unless you verify you are at the address via postcard. Don’t have the capacity to do this yet? No big deal, click Verify Later.
It will take you to your business page now. Pop the logo and such in there. Add in as much information as you can. Then go to https://business.google.com/manage/?hl=en#/list to check out your little listing card. Here is mine:
Beautiful, right? Right.
I then took the opportunity to go to my Gmail account and clean that up by deleting the two default messages, changing the display density to Compact, and in Configure Inbox, unchecking Promotions and Social. That’s all personal preference though, and totally up to you. Takes ten seconds and looks cleaner in my opinion.
Now let’s connect some other Google services to your site to gather some important metrics and verify some important other things as well. Sign up for Google Analytics with your current business account you just made: https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/provision/?authuser=0#provision/SignUp/. Here’s what my stuff looked like when filled out:
Accept the terms like a good little robot and grab that code in the Google Site Tag. Should start with the following: <!-- Global site tag (gtag.js) - Google Analytics —>. Go to your site dashboard and go to Appearance > Editor, and click on Theme Header in the file list on the right (header.php). Paste that whole Google Analytics code in between the head tags on header.php. Save. Now we wait on that. Will be a solid way to gather information on who visits your site. Feel free to go to your Analytics page again and send some test traffic to make sure it goes to the right place and everything is ship shape. Good? Good.
Go to Webmaster Tools now: https://www.google.com/webmasters/#?modal_active=none. Add in the http://[SITE].com URL of your site. To verify fast, go to the Alternate Methods tab, and choose HTML Tag. Take that meta tag, and paste it right below your Analytics code, before the </head>. Hit Verify, and you should get some congratulations.
Ready for the fun part? Do this three more times, once for each of the following once you are done:
http://pvbseo.com
http://www.pvbseo.com
https://pvbseo.com
https://www.pvbseo.com
Getting back to the main Search Console is as easy as clicking the red words Search Console, and then the Add A Property button. The meta tag should be the same for all four versions, so you shouldn’t need to have four meta tags.
You should get a message about improving the search presence of your site. Open the following buttons in new tabs: Set preferred version, Choose country, and Submit a sitemap.
I had my preferred version set to http://pvbseo.com (no www). I also set my target country to the United States. To get your sitemap URL, go back to your site dashboard and then your Yoast dashboard. Click Features, enable the advanced settings, save, and on the left sidebar go to XML Sitemaps. View yours, and copy the URL after your main URL. Should be this: sitemap_index.xml. While you are here, go to Titles and Metas, and click Homepage. Change your meta title and description to something awesome.
In Search Console, click Add/Test sitemap, paste in the above, and submit and refresh. Should be pending. Now go to Fetch as Google. Click Fetch and Render for Desktop without anything in the URL box. Wait a second, and once it processes, request indexing of the URL and its direct links. That’s it!
Now go to https://plus.google.com and Join. Go to your profile and set a tagline by clicking the Edit Profile button. I just used my meta description from my home page.
Now if you go back here: https://aboutme.google.com/?referer=gplus. There should be something called “Story”. Hit the pencil and paste in your About page information. Save, and then make it public by clicking on the lock. This may seem jumbled, but it will work itself out.
Now go here: https://www.youtube.com/create_channel. Create your channel. Then click Customize Channel and add in your cover art as your header. Picture too small? Mine was. I just grabbed a default one from the Gallery at that point. Go to About, and add in your email and country. Add the About page content as the channel description. Then add a link to your home page. Fantastic. There’s plenty more we can do with this, but the hour is up and there are only two left, and we have plenty still to do. Save your stuff. Let’s move on.
HOUR SEVEN - FURTHER SOCIAL MEDIA DIVES + AUTOMATION
In this hour, we are going to build social media pages to Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for our brand. This will be a shorter section content-wise on my end, because you really should know how to create these accounts by now. If my 84-year old grandmother can set up a Facebook and Twitter by herself, you can too.
So, using your newly created Gmail account, create accounts on all three of these sites, using your brand as the username, or some intuitive alternative option of your brand instead, if the username is taken or too long.
I had to go with pvb_seo for my Twitter handle because pontevedrabeachseo was too long and someone already had pvbseo. Not convenient, but that’s life. Also inconvenient is that “Ponte Vedra Beach SEO” is one character too long for the Twitter title. Again, oh well.
Here is my Twitter: https://twitter.com/pvb_seo
I also found a related account and followed 50 people from it to start the warming up process for follow/unfollow on this account.
Here is the Instagram I created from one of the 5 year old accounts from @Valar Instagramis: https://www.instagram.com/pontevedrabeachseo/
Again, I found a related account (https://www.instagram.com/spapontevedra/) and followed 40 people from it to start the warming up process for follow/unfollow on this account.
This is the link to create a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/create. I’m making mine a “Local Business or Place” and filling everything out by the book.Make sure you fill out as much of this as you can accurately. The Page Tips are a great help when it comes to this.
Here is my Facebook business page: https://www.facebook.com/pontevedrabeachseo/.
Great, now we have three links! Remember that placeholder menu we made on the website? Let’s go back to that through Appearance > Menus and edit the placeholder URL’s to point to the actual URL’s of the social media pages. Like so:
Then save, go back to your home page, and make sure everything checks out. In the future, you can add Google+ and YouTube to that if you’d like, but we are going for minimal for the process of BUILDING A BRAND IN A DAY… which we are almost coming to a close on.
I like to submit all three social media URL’s to Google manually as well. It might not make a bit of difference in the end, but right now if I google ponte vedra beach seo I see my site at spot 4, and no social media anywhere. If you literally Google submit URL to Google, you should get a nice input box where you can put your three social media links for quick indexing.
Alright, now to go Hootsuite and sign up for the free plan here: https://hootsuite.com/create-free-account. Once signed up, add your Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ pages. When you have the three added, you should get a screen that looks similar to this:
Fill out your company name, industry, and company size, and move on to the dashboard. I like to delete the default tabs and make a new tab that is simply scheduled messages on each of the three social networks. Once I have that made, I’d like to make a tester post that posts to all three at the same time. So here os how I do that:
See the top where it says “Send to…”. Click that dropdown and select all three networks. The message you compose is going to be about your first post you made a couple hours back. For this, I’m literally using the meta description from the post, a link to the post, and maybe the image that went along with it.This is what the final scheduled dashboard looks like:
I scheduled mine out ten minutes in the future to see how it looks on the screen. Looks like so:
I’ll take it. Feel free to play around with Hootsuite or schedule out relevant news. It’s a very powerful program chock full of useful features. Why aren’t we adding Instagram in here as well? Two reasons. First is that Instagram is a fourth social network, and the free version of Hootsuite only allows three. The second reason is that the interface of Hootsuite doesn’t allow scheduling of Instagram posts, and actually has you finish the posting process from Instagram itself. I prefer to perform my Instagram tasks manually anyways. Follow back rates on Instagram versus other networks are notoriously high.
Here they are posted:
HOUR EIGHT - WRAPPING EVERYTHING UP
Alright, we are now at the last hour. This final hour, we are going to perform just a few quick tweaks to your site, and I will go over some things you can do to get to the next level with your brand. I’ll also post up some useful BST’s for getting the ball rolling on legitimizing your brand even more.
Go to Media > WP Smush on your website dashboard. Hit Skip on the quick setup. Scroll down and toggle Automatic Smush, then hit the big blue button to Bulk Smush your images. It probably won’t do a ton, as we compressed them already, but every little bit counts. Remember, there are multiple versions of your images at various sizes. I ran mine and saved 120kb (7.8%).
Now go to Users > Your Profile. Fill out the basic information. You have no idea how beneficial this is as your blog grows.
Lastly, go to Appearance > Editor and edit the Theme Footer code. After <footer id="footer" class="footer secondary-color-bg dark”> and before </footer>, I put in the following words: Copyright © 2018 Ponte Vedra Beach SEO. All rights reserved.
That’s everything! Here is what you accomplished in this full day:
Congratulations, you’re well on your way to building up a solid brand!
Here are quite a few things you can do to really take things to the next level:
Expired content from @littlewebdragon helps amp up your blog if you don't have the time to write or the budget for high dollar writers: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/high-quality-money-site-pbn-t1-articles-only-1-piece-free-review-copy-for-everyone.928708/. If you do have the budget to get some writing done, I suggest @kyescontent or @CaramelBiscuit for mid-tier prices, @ScribScribScrib for mid-to-high tier pricing, and @SensualTyrannosaurus or myself for high-priced mumbo jumbo. There are tons of great writers on BHW, though. Mix and match, test people out.
For graphics, everything I've ever reviewed from @whiteblackseo has been incredible. Here are his two threads: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/24-hour-professional-logos-quality-logos-at-an-affordable-price-starting-at-12.956928/page-5#post-10518058 and https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/24-hour-designs-graphic-design-solutions-in-less-than-24-hours-starting-at-15.983070/.
If you want to get PBN posts and don't want to go through the trouble of building your own up, check out the PBN's from @Lego or @splishsplash. Again, there are a bunch of good ones, but these two I have used to success.
If you want editorial posts, just go straight to the fucking source: https://www.peopleperhour.com/freelancer/penprince/m/experienced-guest-post-writer-on-au/997469.
There are so many other golden services in the BHW marketplace, the above just scratch the surface. I don't think I can write any more on this without getting frustrated, so that's it, everyone. Enjoy your new brand. The next installment won't be anywhere near this long, I promise.
Look for Putting A Value On Your Time Part 1 - Saying No, Taking Pay Cuts, And Dropping 80% Of Your Clients next month.
-SH
"Yoast is a waste of time, use your head instead."
"This will never pass as a legitimate brand."
"[X] is a better idea than [Y]."
...I don't give a shit.
This monstrosity is the second installment in my https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/1-000-posts-for-me-12-months-of-life-changing-threads-for-you-do-more-be-better-build-wealth.967093/ promise.
If you are looking for the first one, https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/becoming-effective-part-1-using-a-morning-routine-to-compound-productivity-and-do-more-faster.973321/, it's linked right there.
HIGH LEVEL STRUCTURE OF THIS THREAD
HOUR ONE - BRAINSTORMING, DOMAINING, AND BACKEND WORK
Finding your perfect brand name and keyword set
Buying your domain, hosting, and WhoIs protection
Configuring your site in your Managed Wordpress Hosting
HOUR TWO - BASIC WORDPRESS SETUP AND BRANDING
Getting your new Wordpress theme going properly
Trashing most of the clutter and setting up a clean homepage
Gathering images and making them your own, uploading to the site
HOUR THREE - MORE ADVANCED BRANDING PROCESSES AND CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
Gathering images for your team and testimonials
Adding in new images, making the home page unique and branded
Trashing more of the cluttered mess
HOUR FOUR - PLUGINS AND MORE CONTENT WRITING
Adding plugins and pages to your website
Configuring the pre-filled (mostly) site pages (Contact, TOS, Privacy)
Configuring the Resources page from previously published posts
Configuring the Services page properly based on services offered
HOUR FIVE - EVEN MORE CONTENT WRITING
Adding and configuring your About page
Adding in your menus and getting them set up properly
Finding, spinning, SEO’ing, and posting a standard blog post
Quickly developing a custom, free placeholder logo for your brand
HOUR SIX - YOUR GOOD FRIEND GOOGLE
Creating a new Google account as a catch-all for your new brand
Setting up your Google My Business and About Me pages
Setting up Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools for your website
Building a Google+ page for your brand
Development and configuration of a YouTube page for your brand
HOUR SEVEN - FURTHER SOCIAL MEDIA DIVES + AUTOMATION
Creating a new Twitter account and setting it up
Creating a Facebook business page and configuring it properly
Developing an Instagram account for your business
Connecting Twitter, Facebook, and Google+ with Hootsuite
HOUR EIGHT - WRAPPING EVERYTHING UP
Final site edits and configurations
Ten things to take your next steps up
Suggested services from BHW to amp up your brand
INTRODUCTION
In our industry, proper branding is frequently seen as what separates success from failure. “Branding” in itself is a wide-ranging term, but for our sake we are going to define it in this thread as such:
“A solid online presence, and the appearance of being an authority in your product or service niche."
It can take months to truly build a solid brand for what it is that you do. Especially when you start from literal square one. But we are going to get a solid base going in one eight-hour day. That’s right, we are BUILDING A BRAND IN A DAY (yeah, I’m trying to rank for this keyword). It may take longer, you may get done faster. But you should be able to knock out the things in this thread in one solid workday.
This thread requires you to have three things:
- A small bit of start-up capital
- An understanding of how to set up and build websites
- An idea of what product or service you will be offering
Note: This is being done in the US, and prices are in US dollars. Links to sign up for things may be different in your country. Your mileage may vary. Copyright 2017. All rights reserved. Etc etc.
Also Note: I’m sure there are parts of this guide that you know a better workaround for. Your method may be faster or more efficient. I don’t care. This was developed for those who are looking for a start to finish option. This is that. I’d love to hear suggestions, though, for speeding up this process. This is geared towards newer members. Members who may have done some of these pieces, but never truly put them together into one solid package. I’m sure there are plenty of you who have done all of these steps, and probably quite a few who can do them faster and better than I can.
I’m going to do this along with you, including several steps along the way to make things much easier of a process for you, and to save you significant time. Let’s dive into BUILDING A BRAND IN A DAY:
HOUR ONE - BRAINSTORMING, DOMAINING, AND BACKEND WORK
Note: My SSL is screwing up on me. Disregard the fact that my website does not have https for the time being.
Spend sixty seconds brainstorming a name. Literally, set a timer and write down as many names as you can think of. Aim for ten. After the timer goes off, cross out all but your favorite three. Google the brand name in quotes to see if it’s taken. Be smart about this. For mine, there is an area near me called Ponte Vedra Beach. It’s a very wealthy town right on the ocean. I’d like to give local SEO a go in that area, and I’m going to be easy about it and call my brand “Ponte Vedra Beach SEO”.
But Sherbs, doesn’t that really cut down the number of possible customers? Yeah it does. But guess what? If you’re selling $2,000 per month full SEO packages, you only need three or four to make a solid income online.
If you don’t have a name settled on and researched after ten minutes you are doing something wrong. Maybe you thought ahead and already know what you want your brand to be called. Good for you.
Now go to Namecheap. You can use other providers, but I like Namecheap for both domains and hosting, so I’m using them. If you have an account logged in, log out. Find your site name. Dot com always reigns supreme, but dot-net and dot-org work if need be. Dot-io makes you look tech-y if you feel like taking the hipster route.
http://Pontevedrabeachseo.com wasn’t taken, but that’s a long brand name. I went for PVBSEO.com. Six letters, beautiful, not taken. Added to the cart, and also added in PositiveSSL to get that legitimate HTTPS look. Total price is $11.05. I could put it on one of my current hosting accounts, but we are starting from scratch here. Don’t buy it yet.
Namecheap has one-site managed Wordpress hosting for $8.88 for the first year https://www.namecheap.com/hosting/managed-wordpress.aspx. Buy that first. It’ll take you right into the login area. Make an account.
Choose a domain from Namecheap when you are prompted. It’ll take you to the home page. Guess what? Your stuff is still in the cart. Go to the cart, make sure all is set (that free Whois protection for the first year is killer). Confirm order and fill out the contact information. On the next screen make sure WhoisGuard Privacy Protection is checked. Hit continue again.
Pay with the same card. Then everything processes. You should have a bunch of emails now. Go to your EasyWP dashboard. You in? Choose your domain you just bought. Show advanced options. Pick a nice theme. I chose Optimizer. Note that you can scroll down to see more themes. Want to make the rest of this guide super easy to follow? Do what I do exactly. Hit create, wait a few seconds, and hit confirm.
While that sets up, go back to your email. You may have one regarding immediate verification of contact details. Click that link to verify your email address. While the Wordpress finishes installing, let’s sit back and marvel at how, within 30 minutes (or less), and for just under $20, you have managed Wordpress hosting, a branded domain, Whois protection, and SSL for a year.
Are there easier ways? Sure. Are there cheaper ways? Absolutely. You could grab a Blogspot site and an XYZ domain for less than a dollar. But remember, we are going for a bulletproof brand, and we are doing this in eight hours. We are BUILDING A BRAND IN A DAY. After a few minutes, you should be set up. Click the three menu dots and check out your new site. Not working? Mine wasn’t either. DNS is still probably churning. No matter. You’ve got other tasks to attend to in the meantime. Go into your EasyWP site settings. See the spots to upload an SSL certificate and a Private Key? Let’s go find them to get your SSL fully set up. This is the most technical step of this whole process.
Go to your https://ap.www.namecheap.com/ProductList/SslCertificates on Namecheap. You should see a certificate that needs to be activated. There it is! Hit activate. We don’t want to go through the CSR request process, as we are on a time schedule, so instead we go https://decoder.link/csr_generator. Fill that out, CHECK YOUR WWW VS NON-WWW, then copy the certificate and private key somewhere. Post the CSR into the box back in your SSL Activate tab. It’ll grab your domain. Set your server type and activate. Then hit next. Choose the DNS-based DCV method. Put NA for the company name on the next screen. Then fill out whatever you’d like on the rest (use real information, remember, you’re a bulletproof brand builder now). On the next step, hit confirm. It will initiate the SSL certificate, and move the status to IN PROGRESS.
Now look at the line for DCV Methods In Use. See the EDIT METHODS dropdown? Click that. Then click Get Record. Go to a new tab and get to your https://ap.www.namecheap.com/. Go to your domain details, and the Advanced DNS tab. Now let’s add a new CNAME record. Copy and paste the Host and Target from the other tab and save it.
Now we wait a little bit. If you run into issues, there’s live chat always available, which is nice. They are usually competent and quick to solve most issues. Shortly, it should go from IN PROGRESS to ISSUED. Once that happens, go to the dropdown for See Details and download the certificate ZIP file.
HOUR TWO - BASIC WORDPRESS SETUP AND BRANDING
Get into your Wordpress dashboard and go to Appearance > Themes. Install and activate a theme called Allegiant. Once you do that, delete the other theme(s). You don’t need them cluttering your database.
You’ll notice a big orange notification icon with About Allegiant. Click that. Install and activate, download and import everything they recommend. This takes a few minutes. Now check out your home page. Pretty beautiful, right? Here’s my above the fold. Yours should look similar:
Get it? Got it? Now let’s gut it. Go to Posts > All Posts. Delete them all, and empty the trash. Go to Posts > Categories, and delete those as well. Do the same for Posts > Tags. I told you, we are gutting. Now go to Pages > All Pages and delete everything. I bet that feels reckless.
Now you’ve got a relatively clean slate except for the home page. Let’s gut some of that, too. Here are the current sections: Navigation bar, slider, features, custom tagline, portfolio, what is offered, testimonials, some random logos, a team section, the now empty blog section, and the footer. Let’s cut out the custom tagline, portfolio, random logos and footer garbage.
Go to Clients > Clients and move everything to the trash. Empty that trash out. Now go to Media > Media Library. See those nine white logo images? Highlight them and trash them. While you’re in there, delete the six portfolio images that can be found on the home page. In fact, you can delete all the media items in there except background-forest, slide 1, and slide 2. It’ll look like this when you’re done gutting:
Isn’t that refreshing and minimal? Remember, these can always be changed later. But for now, we are… BUILDING A BRAND IN A DAY.
Now go to Portfolio > Portfolio and delete everything, then empty the trash. Now go to Customize > Layout > Homepage and remove the tagline text to get the custom tagline to disappear. Save and publish. Go to your Widgets and remove the footer widgets that are there (there will be something in all three). Beautiful.
Now it’s time for me to do some background research for you and save you some time. Your slider images on the home page are sized at 1903x801. Your background image is 1903x1070. You are going to need four team member images that are 315x315, and three testimonial images that are probably around 200x200. We are also going to grab some blog featured images while we are batching tasks together. Let’s say five of them, all somewhat related, with a planned size of 1500x500.
Go to Pexels. I love Pexels, as they are simple, and the images are large and high quality. This is where we will get our background, slider, and post images. Find something nice for the background. This is what I grabbed: https://static.pexels.com/photos/32237/pexels-photo.jpg. Name it something relevant when saving. In going with the minimal space approach for the slider images, I grabbed the following two: https://static.pexels.com/photos/37728/pexels-photo-37728.jpeg and https://static.pexels.com/photos/108601/pexels-photo-108601.jpeg. And then the five post images in typical hipster fashion:
https://static.pexels.com/photos/106344/pexels-photo-106344.jpeg
https://static.pexels.com/photos/196655/pexels-photo-196655.jpeg
https://static.pexels.com/photos/163130/keyboard-black-notebook-input-163130.jpeg
https://static.pexels.com/photos/34676/pexels-photo.jpg
https://static.pexels.com/photos/374016/pexels-photo-374016.jpeg
Now for some image editing to make them “your own”. I’m a fan of black and white with random small pops of color. I use it in most of my sites, and this is going to be no exception. So here is my process for the five post images first: Resize the width to 1500, crop the height to 500, make the color black and white, pop into compressjpeg.com, download the compressed versions, upload to the Media Library. Here is my end result:
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/pvb-seo-post-5-min.jpeg
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/pvb-seo-post-4-min.jpg
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/pvb-seo-post-3-min.jpeg
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/pvb-seo-post-2-min.jpeg
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/pvb-seo-post-1-min.jpeg
The background and slider images I will do a similar process to, except I will leave the background image at the color scheme it is. The sizes will be 1903x801 for the slider images and 1903x1070 for the background image. Here are the end results of that:
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ponte-vedra-beach-seo-background-min.jpg
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/pvb-seo-slider-1-min.jpeg
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/pvb-seo-slider-2-min.jpeg
With the crop and color change, as well as file name change, Google will likely see these all as original (except for the background image). Which doesn’t really matter. None of that does. Moving on to the pictures of people now.
Here is how I grab my placeholder team member images: Go to a random law firm website and grab a few of their related looking team member images. By random I mean random. Here is what I came up with by searching “omaha nebraska law firms”, clicking on a link in the middle of the second page, going to their team page, and selecting the letter D: https://www.koleyjessen.com/team?do_item_search=1&letter=D#form-search-results
It just so happens I need four of them, and there are four on that page. So nice of them to make the images transparent PNG’s as well. I went to each team member page and downloaded the images as team#.png, 1 to 4. I resized to 315x315, flipped them all horizontally, made them all black and white, ran them through compresspng.com, and uploaded to the Media Library. Here is my end result:
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/team4-min.png
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/team3-min.png
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/team2-min.png
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/team1-min.png
And I went ahead and went to the M’s on that same law firm site and grabbed three of them and did the same process for the testimonials, just sized at 200x200. Here’s that end result:
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/testimonial3-min.png
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/testimonial2-min.png
http://pvbseo.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/testimonial1-min.png
Beautiful. Why did I not just leave the team/testimonial images as they were on the demo. Because we’re our own brand, not a demo. If your potential clients are smart enough to think to reverse image search your team pictures, they are going to quickly find that they’re demo-side, and the hundreds of other sites using the exact same pictures. If they reverse image search there, they’re clean. As long as you guys don’t copy my exact process. Please don’t.
Now if you go to your homepage, there are nice orange EDIT buttons everywhere. Go ahead and replace the images in your team, testimonials, and slider with your new images. Or save a little time by going through the Team Members, Testimonials and Slides section on your Wordpress dashboard. You can also change the background image through Customize > General Theme Options > Background Image. Now you can go into your Media Library and delete the last three images from the demo theme.
That’s a wrap for the second hour. For hour three we take this home page, add our own content, and create a nice logo set for ourselves as well.
HOUR THREE - MORE ADVANCED BRANDING PROCESSES AND CONTENT DEVELOPMENT
Alright, time to crack down. There are several text areas of the home page: Slider 1, Slider 2, The “Features” section with three sub sections, the “offerings” section with three subsections, three testimonials, four team members, and the footer. For god’s sake, never forget the footer. Let’s make these our own.
Start filling that stuff out. I suggest starting with the testimonials and team section. For inspiration, Google around, steal the content of others and then spin it to your own liking and wording. Here’s a way to get solid testimonial examples quickly: https://www.google.com/search?q=seo+testimonials+examples.
I went here first: https://shannonksteffen.com/client-testimonials/. Here are the first three testimonials:
“Shannon was an extremely valuable asset as we worked to grown in our understanding of SEO best practices and how we could implement them on our website in an efficient manner. She is a fantastic teacher and very well-versed in her areas of expertise!”
“I am thrilled with the work Shannon did with the SEO for my website. Shannon took a concept that was confusing to me, and made it easy to understand. She gave our team actionable tips, and we are seeing results! Shannon's comprehensive program, along with her delightful personality, make SEO fun!”
“Anyone looking for the Swiss Army knife of search engine optimization (SEO), web design and social media program execution need look no further then Shannon Steffen. Shannon possesses a broad perspective as well as the experience to execute projects from kick-off to go-live. I look forward to collaborating with Shannon again soon.”
Here they are with my own spin on them to make them my own:
“Ponte Vendra Beach SEO was an extremely valuable asset as we developed into growing to understand our business’ own best practices for search optimization.”
“We were thrilled with the work Ponte Vedra Beach SEO did to both our website and our entire online brand. They took confusing concepts and made them simple.”
“Anybody on the lookout for a Swiss Army knife of search engine optimization, web development, and social media management need look no further than PVB SEO.”
Short and sweet and to the point. We don’t want to clutter the home page with filler. As I added in the new information in the testimonials to replace the lorem ipsum text, I used http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/ to grab new names to use. The end result is quite nice:
Here was my source for grabbing team information to spin: https://www.google.com/search?num=40&q=meet+our+team+seo. One of them is going to be based on me, so the other three needed to be added in. Here was the link I settled on: https://www.1stonthelist.ca/company/meet-our-seo-team/. And here were the three I grabbed initially:
"Tony loves coffee, music and writing. With nearly 2 decades of content optimization experience, he’s well versed in everything SEO. Tony has worked with clients from virtually every industry making him the proverbial “Jack of all Trades.” From developing in depth content strategies and consulting with clients to creative and technical writing plus website design coaching, Tony is one of our client’s most valuable resources. Tony’s love for the creative extends to writing his own music, performing with his band and producing multi-media charitable fundraisers.”
"Angela is the technical brains behind implementing backend source code and tweaking websites just so. Often times her work isn’t visible to the untrained eye but is definitely noticeable in terms of traffic increases and improved site performance. Eager to learn the newest trends in SEO including recent Microdata Markup, Rich Snippet Integration and Open Graph Protocol, Angela is always going the extra mile for all her clients. Angela worked in our head office for 3 ½ years but now telecommutes since she and her family opted for the low key island life and made the move across the waters to Vancouver Island. Flipping houses with her husband is also one of her passions.”
"Robin has been designing website since she was 12 years old when she thought to herself that web design couldn’t be that difficult. Initially self-taught Robin has a natural knack for designing in WordPress and helping clients create websites that are user friendly, attractive and Search Engine friendly. She loves websites that have great design and clean code. Since joining our team in 2010 Robin has not only designed websites but has also implemented client training for updating their own websites, mobile friendly website design plus security plans. When Robin isn’t in the office she is at the stables with her daughter and her horse Ruby.”
Those are way too long for our home page, so here are my condensations and rewrites:
“Mark loves music, writing, hiking and good-quality coffee. With over twenty solid years of content optimization experience under his belt, he has been in the SEO game since the beginning.”
“Cynthia is the technical brains behind the implementation of backend code and website tweaking. While her work may not be visible, there is no doubting its need.”
“Wanda has been developing websites since she was eleven years old. Self taught, she has a knack for Wordpress design, and can be found assisting clients in their design needs.”
The end result of that for my brand example is as such:
Here is my new text for the sliders:
Slider 1: We have a stellar track record of assisting our customers and clients reach a broader audience and increase both profitability and return on investment | Take your business to the mainstream with PVB SEO.
Slider 2: Whether a small business or individual brand, we grow your search presence with a creative blend of innovative concepts | Fully optimized SEO solutions for businesses.
For the features and offerings section, I highly suggest keeping things very short, and utilizing different feature icons as found when you go to edit the individual items. I went quickly and the sales copy is not the best, but I attributed three of the main facets of SEO (website, social media, links) to parts of the circulatory system as such:
Pardon the terrible choice in icons, too. I free-wrote the services offered, edited the icons as well, and ended up with the following:
I’m pleased with the final result. I try to keep exact offerings vague, as if this ever turns from a demo into actual SEO customers locally, I want to be able to have completely dynamic campaigns dependent on the needs of the customer. One of the things learned from serious reputation management for years.
Now go to Customize > Layout, and alter the text a bit on the following sections: Features, Services, Team Members, and Testimonials. For me, "Our core features” became "Our Three-Part Focus”. "What we can offer you” became "PVB SEO's Offerings”. "Meet our team” became “Meet Our Motley Crew”. "What they say about us” became "Things We've Been Told”. While you are still in Customizer, go to Widgets, Default Widgets, and remove Recent Comments, Meta, the CPO Widgets, and the second Recent Comments.
Now go to Appearance > Editor > footer.php and remove the following lines:
<div class="container">
<?php do_action('cpotheme_footer'); ?>
</div>
This removes the attribution from the Wordpress theme. Granted, now there’s a gray box with a single white line, but we will take care of that in the last hour when we polish everything up.
At this point, congratulations, you’ve made the home page your own. In hour four, we are going to add some sub pages so prospective customers can see more about you, can check out your terms of service and privacy policy, and can contact you. In hour five we are going to finish that up and spin one quick but informative post.
HOUR FOUR - PLUGINS AND MORE CONTENT WRITING
Alright, time to install some plugins. Go to the plugin installed and set up/activate the following Wordpress plugins:
- Contact Form 7
- Auto Terms of Service and Privacy Policy
- Yoast SEO
- Wordfence Security
- Smush Image Compression and Optimization
Looking for a way to speed this up? Install all five from the Plugin search sections, and then go to the Plugins > Installed Plugins page and check them all off and activate all five at once. Skip and dismiss everything, and you should be on the screen for Auto Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Go ahead and fill the fields out, making sure to change from Off/Coming Soon to On/Displaying.
You should see the following available shortcodes:
- [my_terms_of_service]
- [my_privacy_policy]
- [contact-form-7 id="3675" title="Contact form 1”]
For TOS and Privacy, paste in your shortcodes as text, not visual. Then publish the two pages and check the formatting and ensure the data propagated properly. I then like to go ahead and put some custom Yoast meta titles and descriptions with these pages. Here’s what I added in:
For the Contact page, paste in your third shortcode ([contact-form-7 id="3675" title="Contact form 1”]) and then above the shortcode put in text similar to the following, filling in the blanks as you go:
[BRAND] is dedicated to providing you with the highest quality [SERVICE SUMMARY] services available. While operating local [SERVICE] out of the [LOCATION] area, we also have a dedicated branch focused on offering our [SERVICE SUMMARY] services to a broader, online-focused audience.
If you are interested in finding out more information about our process, would like to get in touch with us for a potential project, or just have a question, comment, or concern for our team, we urge you to fill out the contact form below. [BRAND] will respond to your inquiry in 24 hours or less. Thanks!
[contact-form-7 id="3675" title="Contact form 1”]
If you have better copy, go for it. I’m just trying to take some of the work time out of your schedule for this. I also went ahead and put one of those five black and white images up on the Contact page, leaving me with four remaining. Again, put in some clever meta information by editing the snippet in the Yoast section immediately below the text box:
The next page, Resources, I’m going to cheat on. As it is SEO based, I looked up a list of the “best SEO blogs” and found a pretty good one that didn’t include Charles Floate here: https://www.digitalauthority.me/insights/best-digital-marketing-blogs-2017-25-06-2017. I copied their list, pasted it into my Resources page, and removed the images. I’m not going for originality at the moment, just speed. When I pasted, the formatting stayed and the links stayed as well. Double bonus. I suggest you do the same with your niche. Or if you feel white hat, write your own. Or don’t include this page at all. I don’t care.
Remember, we are building a brand in a day. After the one day, feel free to go back and revise and upgrade anything you’d like. I popped a clever meta title and description onto that page as well:
Two pages to go. Time for Services. That’s the biggie. Guess what? While the home page might be cryptic, the Services page is actually going to have a listing of services offered by this brand. And guess what else? Since this is a live brand and site, if someone actually orders one of my services, I am going to deliver. So what do I plan to offer? I’m going to resell services from https://www.thehoth.com/welcome/?newuser=1&. This is a pretty common thing that a lot of SEO services do… especially some of the white label services floating around this site. I plan to offer upsold versions of all of their services except for their reputation management software, editorial posts, and tier 2 garbage.
But how to make this appear original? By putting the hammer down and getting some writing done. Want to increase the speed that this page is completed, while offering a similar solution? Spin my copy. But I do mean spin it. If I Google my sentences from my Services page and find carbon copies out there, I will find out who you are and out you extremely fast. So here is my copy:
http://pvbseo.com/services/
I would paste it in here, but I don’t think you guys want to sit through 1,800 more words. I included links to the Contact page with call to action copy after each service option provided. I also set the Layout Options to be full width, removing the blog-style sidebar. The rest of the pages can have the sidebar, but for this I want to focus to be on the services we offer. I also edited the meta title and description via Yoast for this page as well:
Again, feel free to spin my spin. Feel free to make your own based on the product or service you are offering. Whatever you need to do. But for this project, this is the page that will drive rankings more than any other. I’m sure doing so will take the remainder of the fourth hour, so we will move straight into Hour Five.
HOUR FIVE - EVEN MORE CONTENT WRITING
And this leaves the About page. Aim for over 300 words with this. We are going to be doing a lot of writing this hour. Here is a good place to look for inspiration: https://www.google.com/search?q=seo+services+about+us. Again, spin spin spin. If you’re wanting this to be your own true brand, then you already know the “About Us”. Write it. If you think it might sound bad, run it through Grammarly and Hemingway and see what those tools say.
I decided to spin the About section of Coalition Technologies to fit my needs. Here is the original: https://coalitiontechnologies.com/who-we-are/. There is some serious garbage in there at the beginning, but the meat of it is alright, and spinnable to meet my needs.
Here is my take on it:
The Ponte Vedra Beach Search Engine Optimization team is small yet mighty. Our presence is local but our reach is global. Our leadership is committed to providing a stellar working environment for employees, as well as opportunities to better themselves and their customers. By hiring only the best of the best, and then encouraging consistent improvement from there, Ponte Vedra Beach SEO provides an unrivaled value to the customer.
We don’t operate as a traditional marketing company or public relations firm. Ponte Vedra Beach SEO does not put any focus onto traditional media and print marketing. Our team is completely dedicated to the immense power of online marketing. The results generated for businesses and individual compared to physical alternatives has a far stronger positive affect on ROI.
Ponte Vedra Beach SEO is dedicated to providing the strongest search engine strategies and out-of-the-box black hat and white hat optimization methods you will find anywhere in the First Coast area. Our team is capable of stretching into the realms of email marketing, social media management, and mobile engagement with ease, with a high level of professionalism and expertise that reaches the far corners of Internet marketing.
Our team members are a think tank, and a beacon of light in a sea of darkness that is “the same old SEO company offering the same old stuff”. We have a combined service load of hundreds of total clients, and a combined search engine optimization experience of almost a century. Our client retention rate is over 95%, and we have never left a client unsatisfied.
Created in late 2017 as a combination of multiple freelancers, Ponte Vedra Beach SEO is dedicated to developing a stronger knowledge and push of the SEO game across not only Ponte Vedra, but also surrounding areas and beyond. We act local, but think global.
Simple, to the point, straightforward, and fast. Is this a final version? Absolutely not. I’m sure in future days, not just day one, I would expand this greatly, add subsections, etc. This would be the case for all pages. But for a start, and on the first day, it will do. I also went ahead and put one of those five black and white images up on the About page, leaving me with three remaining.
Then, of course, give it a snazzy custom meta title and description:
Once that is published, you should have six solid pages of content. Time to put a completed menu up on your header, now. Go to Appearance > Menus. In the Select a menu to edit dropdown, select Main. Select all pages and add them. I put them in this order: About, Services, Contact, Resources, TOS, Privacy. Then check off Display Location as Main Menu. Save and check out your home page to see how it looks:
That’s acceptable. Check and make sure all the pages go to the right place. They should by default, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. All good? Good. Go back to Menus. We are going to make a placeholder social menu while we are here.
Select Top as the menu name. On the left, go to the dropdown for Custom Links. Add links for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Set the link URL’s as “#” for now. Set as the Top menu and save, then check out how that looks. Not bad:
We can make changes to that in the last hour if we feel like it when we polish things up. Now let’s do some more writing.
Find yourself one article on an SEO blog. I like to Google “SEO Blog” and go back to page 20 or so. Look for something around 400-600 words. “But Sherbs, longform content is better, you always preach that.” Yeah, I know I do. But we are building a brand in a day. There will be plenty of time for longform articles and content on content on content in the future of your brand.
Here is an okay one I found:
https://www.rankmagic.com/dont-use-keywords-meta-tag/
So, let’s spin this shall we?
I’m changing the title to "Keywords meta tag: useless for SEO” and starting a new post. The URL that propagates is too long for my tastes, so I change the slug to keywords-meta-tag. Then I paste the current article and spin it. This takes me about 15 minutes. Might take you more, might take you less.
Here is article one, rewritten (this took me exactly 11 minutes and is 582 words… the wonder of spinning content that already exists):
It boggles our minds that there are still people out there working in search engine optimization who utilize the keywords meta tag. This is not a post that should even need to be written. This tag has been defunct and relatively useless for SEO for several years. Yet still, websites that are proudly developed by "prestige and professional" SEO firms are still using elaborate, excessive meta keyword tagging.
Here is a little bit of history for those who might be confused as to why this is a useless feature and a waste of time in current search engine optimization practice:
The concept of the"meta tag" began to be utilized over twenty years ago. Long before Google came to be the search titan that it is today. Search engines such as AskJeeves, InfoSeek, Lycos, and AltaVista reigned supreme. Elder, more seasoned SEO professionals were advising their clients that the keywords meta tag, stating "The keywords meta tag was developed to help search engines to know what a page was trying to rank for". This was back in the early days, when SEO was a process that could be easily replicated and was relatively static. No more.
Twenty years ago, popular search terms were vastly different compared to what they are today. At that time, one of the most popular search engine terms input by users was "Britney Spears". For some owners of the precursor sites to the concept of "going viral", this was a compelling opportunity. Their theory was, that if millions upon millions of people were searching this term, why not add this tag to our own website in the keywords meta tag? Then these millions of people would be pushed to our site instead, and surely some of those would want to buy what we have to offer!
So they did so. They added that term and many other popular terms, albeit completely unrelated, to their keywords meta tag to try and fool search engines into sending traffic their way. This was in the days where excess was king. They would add the tag multiple times, shoved between other tags, capitalized, lowercase, and more.
It wasn't much longer after this started occurring with reckless abandon that search engines began to take notice. They spotted these sketchy tactics quickly, and started treating sites that did this as "search engine spam". The result of this was that these advanced search engines completely stopped using the keyword meta tag to rank websites, opting instead for ridiculously advanced custom algorithms. Ever since this happened, many many years ago, the keywords meta tag became worthless.
However, these legends and myths die a very brutal death. As recently as 2008, Matt Cutts was forced to publish a video thoroughly explaining that Google definitely does NOT utilize the keywords meta tag at all in the ranking of their websites. Other search giants Bing and Yahoo have seconded this notion. They represent almost all of the search share in developed countries, and prove that this meta tag will not help your site at all in ranking higher in searches.
What's even worse is that a keywords meta tag in your website's code may be seen as a spam signal from search engines, a desperate attempt to fool them into search rankings better than you earned. This isn't blackhat. This is just plain bad decision making and poor search engine optimization skills. This tag will hurt your ranks more than help them. Please stop using it.
-Ponte Vedra Beach SEO team
I’ll be honest… I think if my article and the original came out at the same time on sites with identical metrics, mine would rank better. Just saying.
I add an awesome meta setup:
Added a focus keyword in the Yoast panel of "keywords meta tag”, and added an internal and external link as instructed (internal link in a one-line CTA I added), as well as a black and white post image with “keywords meta tag” as the alt tag. And would you look at that:
That’s what I like to see. I added a new category called Search Engine Optimization, and then tags of seo, keywords meta tag, and search engine optimization, and published. Here it is: http://pvbseo.com/2017/10/25/keywords-meta-tag/
And this does it for new content we will be adding to the site. Go to your homepage and scroll to the bottom. You should see your post there, with populated information in the sidebar now for Archives, Recent Posts, Categories, and Tags. Go team.
Let’s round out the hour by making yourself a fancy, quick logo. This is absolutely temporary, and I highly suggest getting an actual logo made by someone if you aren’t a designer in your own right. I have used services from Fiverr to some degree of success, but @whiteblackseo on here does wonderful work, faster and less expensive than the Fiverr alternatives. Highly recommended.
We are going to use Adobe Spark for this. Go here: https://spark.adobe.com/make/logo-maker/.
Click “Create your own logo now”. You should get some brown looking Cafe Adrian thing. Go to layout, and I suggest for the website header logo to change it to banner size. Play around with things for a little bit. It’s pretty intuitive.
When you have your logo how you like it, click Share, and then Download. Boom, logo. Don’t quit out of it yet. Go back to your logo, Go to Layout > Resize, and make it square. Then mess with the text until it’s not tiny if yours got small. Share, and download. Now go and rename your files. I called mine ponte-vedra-beach-seo-header and ponte-vedra-beach-seo-square. Before we close out the hour, let’s pop your header logo into the site to see how it looks.
Go to Customize, then General Theme Options > Site Identity. Set a title and tagline (because that’s what shows in your browser tab). Then upload your new logo. Don’t like what you see? Then you’re probably like me. There’s an option to have a text title. Do that. There’s plenty of time to get things how you want them. We can focus on the overall branding graphics wise on the social media pages and Google stuff. Which we will start right now!
HOUR SIX - YOUR GOOD FRIEND GOOGLE
Alright, guys. This is where things start progressing brand-wise. See that square logo? You’re going to use that. See your background image? That will be utilized as well as a header image for now. Again, these can ALWAYS be changed.
Go to http://knowem.com and pop in your company name, as short as possible, to see what username combinations are available. You can also just try to search for the URL. Check combinations and see what’s up. Now you’re going to register some social media sites. Just a few. We don’t have all day here. The hours are almost over.
But stop! Before you do anything else, start a new Gmail account. https://accounts.google.com/SignUp will get you there probably. Make the name your business name. I was able to get [email protected] too. That’s great.
Once you create your account, you’ll be in your main My Account section. Go to Personal Info and Privacy > Your personal info. Verify your phone number if you have the capacity to do so. Then click About Me, and you’ll be to aboutme.google.com. Wonderful. Add your square logo as the profile image, and the background image from your site as the header image.
Here is where it gets important. Go here: https://www.google.com/business/. Click Start Now. Then fill in your business information. Options for addresses: Fake address that you can’t get manually approved, UPS (or foreign equivalent) box that you buy and use as an address (PO boxes don’t work), your actual office or storefront address, or your home address. I’d use my home address, but not only am I not in Ponte Vedra Beach, I don’t want you guys knowing exactly where I live.
So guess what? There’s a UPS Store at 1000 Pga Tour Blvd, Ponte Vedra Beach, FL 32082. I’m putting that in for now. I’ll update this thread later if I decide to move forward with my business listing and get a real UPS box there.
Phone number? If you don’t have a local phone number of where you are, go here: https://voice.google.com/u/0/about. Connect your phone to it (oh no Google will have my info… shut up). Or don’t. Put in a fake number. I don’t care. The more legit, the more legitimate your brand will appear right off the bat.
Enter your category and website URL, and let ‘er rip. Once you progress, you’ll see why it’s important to have a real address. Your listing won’t go “live” on Google Local (at least not in the US) unless you verify you are at the address via postcard. Don’t have the capacity to do this yet? No big deal, click Verify Later.
It will take you to your business page now. Pop the logo and such in there. Add in as much information as you can. Then go to https://business.google.com/manage/?hl=en#/list to check out your little listing card. Here is mine:
Beautiful, right? Right.
I then took the opportunity to go to my Gmail account and clean that up by deleting the two default messages, changing the display density to Compact, and in Configure Inbox, unchecking Promotions and Social. That’s all personal preference though, and totally up to you. Takes ten seconds and looks cleaner in my opinion.
Now let’s connect some other Google services to your site to gather some important metrics and verify some important other things as well. Sign up for Google Analytics with your current business account you just made: https://analytics.google.com/analytics/web/provision/?authuser=0#provision/SignUp/. Here’s what my stuff looked like when filled out:
Accept the terms like a good little robot and grab that code in the Google Site Tag. Should start with the following: <!-- Global site tag (gtag.js) - Google Analytics —>. Go to your site dashboard and go to Appearance > Editor, and click on Theme Header in the file list on the right (header.php). Paste that whole Google Analytics code in between the head tags on header.php. Save. Now we wait on that. Will be a solid way to gather information on who visits your site. Feel free to go to your Analytics page again and send some test traffic to make sure it goes to the right place and everything is ship shape. Good? Good.
Go to Webmaster Tools now: https://www.google.com/webmasters/#?modal_active=none. Add in the http://[SITE].com URL of your site. To verify fast, go to the Alternate Methods tab, and choose HTML Tag. Take that meta tag, and paste it right below your Analytics code, before the </head>. Hit Verify, and you should get some congratulations.
Ready for the fun part? Do this three more times, once for each of the following once you are done:
http://pvbseo.com
http://www.pvbseo.com
https://pvbseo.com
https://www.pvbseo.com
Getting back to the main Search Console is as easy as clicking the red words Search Console, and then the Add A Property button. The meta tag should be the same for all four versions, so you shouldn’t need to have four meta tags.
You should get a message about improving the search presence of your site. Open the following buttons in new tabs: Set preferred version, Choose country, and Submit a sitemap.
I had my preferred version set to http://pvbseo.com (no www). I also set my target country to the United States. To get your sitemap URL, go back to your site dashboard and then your Yoast dashboard. Click Features, enable the advanced settings, save, and on the left sidebar go to XML Sitemaps. View yours, and copy the URL after your main URL. Should be this: sitemap_index.xml. While you are here, go to Titles and Metas, and click Homepage. Change your meta title and description to something awesome.
In Search Console, click Add/Test sitemap, paste in the above, and submit and refresh. Should be pending. Now go to Fetch as Google. Click Fetch and Render for Desktop without anything in the URL box. Wait a second, and once it processes, request indexing of the URL and its direct links. That’s it!
Now go to https://plus.google.com and Join. Go to your profile and set a tagline by clicking the Edit Profile button. I just used my meta description from my home page.
Now if you go back here: https://aboutme.google.com/?referer=gplus. There should be something called “Story”. Hit the pencil and paste in your About page information. Save, and then make it public by clicking on the lock. This may seem jumbled, but it will work itself out.
Now go here: https://www.youtube.com/create_channel. Create your channel. Then click Customize Channel and add in your cover art as your header. Picture too small? Mine was. I just grabbed a default one from the Gallery at that point. Go to About, and add in your email and country. Add the About page content as the channel description. Then add a link to your home page. Fantastic. There’s plenty more we can do with this, but the hour is up and there are only two left, and we have plenty still to do. Save your stuff. Let’s move on.
HOUR SEVEN - FURTHER SOCIAL MEDIA DIVES + AUTOMATION
In this hour, we are going to build social media pages to Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook for our brand. This will be a shorter section content-wise on my end, because you really should know how to create these accounts by now. If my 84-year old grandmother can set up a Facebook and Twitter by herself, you can too.
So, using your newly created Gmail account, create accounts on all three of these sites, using your brand as the username, or some intuitive alternative option of your brand instead, if the username is taken or too long.
I had to go with pvb_seo for my Twitter handle because pontevedrabeachseo was too long and someone already had pvbseo. Not convenient, but that’s life. Also inconvenient is that “Ponte Vedra Beach SEO” is one character too long for the Twitter title. Again, oh well.
Here is my Twitter: https://twitter.com/pvb_seo
I also found a related account and followed 50 people from it to start the warming up process for follow/unfollow on this account.
Here is the Instagram I created from one of the 5 year old accounts from @Valar Instagramis: https://www.instagram.com/pontevedrabeachseo/
Again, I found a related account (https://www.instagram.com/spapontevedra/) and followed 40 people from it to start the warming up process for follow/unfollow on this account.
This is the link to create a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/pages/create. I’m making mine a “Local Business or Place” and filling everything out by the book.Make sure you fill out as much of this as you can accurately. The Page Tips are a great help when it comes to this.
Here is my Facebook business page: https://www.facebook.com/pontevedrabeachseo/.
Great, now we have three links! Remember that placeholder menu we made on the website? Let’s go back to that through Appearance > Menus and edit the placeholder URL’s to point to the actual URL’s of the social media pages. Like so:
Then save, go back to your home page, and make sure everything checks out. In the future, you can add Google+ and YouTube to that if you’d like, but we are going for minimal for the process of BUILDING A BRAND IN A DAY… which we are almost coming to a close on.
I like to submit all three social media URL’s to Google manually as well. It might not make a bit of difference in the end, but right now if I google ponte vedra beach seo I see my site at spot 4, and no social media anywhere. If you literally Google submit URL to Google, you should get a nice input box where you can put your three social media links for quick indexing.
Alright, now to go Hootsuite and sign up for the free plan here: https://hootsuite.com/create-free-account. Once signed up, add your Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ pages. When you have the three added, you should get a screen that looks similar to this:
Fill out your company name, industry, and company size, and move on to the dashboard. I like to delete the default tabs and make a new tab that is simply scheduled messages on each of the three social networks. Once I have that made, I’d like to make a tester post that posts to all three at the same time. So here os how I do that:
See the top where it says “Send to…”. Click that dropdown and select all three networks. The message you compose is going to be about your first post you made a couple hours back. For this, I’m literally using the meta description from the post, a link to the post, and maybe the image that went along with it.This is what the final scheduled dashboard looks like:
I scheduled mine out ten minutes in the future to see how it looks on the screen. Looks like so:
I’ll take it. Feel free to play around with Hootsuite or schedule out relevant news. It’s a very powerful program chock full of useful features. Why aren’t we adding Instagram in here as well? Two reasons. First is that Instagram is a fourth social network, and the free version of Hootsuite only allows three. The second reason is that the interface of Hootsuite doesn’t allow scheduling of Instagram posts, and actually has you finish the posting process from Instagram itself. I prefer to perform my Instagram tasks manually anyways. Follow back rates on Instagram versus other networks are notoriously high.
Here they are posted:
HOUR EIGHT - WRAPPING EVERYTHING UP
Alright, we are now at the last hour. This final hour, we are going to perform just a few quick tweaks to your site, and I will go over some things you can do to get to the next level with your brand. I’ll also post up some useful BST’s for getting the ball rolling on legitimizing your brand even more.
Go to Media > WP Smush on your website dashboard. Hit Skip on the quick setup. Scroll down and toggle Automatic Smush, then hit the big blue button to Bulk Smush your images. It probably won’t do a ton, as we compressed them already, but every little bit counts. Remember, there are multiple versions of your images at various sizes. I ran mine and saved 120kb (7.8%).
Now go to Users > Your Profile. Fill out the basic information. You have no idea how beneficial this is as your blog grows.
Lastly, go to Appearance > Editor and edit the Theme Footer code. After <footer id="footer" class="footer secondary-color-bg dark”> and before </footer>, I put in the following words: Copyright © 2018 Ponte Vedra Beach SEO. All rights reserved.
That’s everything! Here is what you accomplished in this full day:
- Website setup on newly purchased domain with SSL and private Whois
- Complete website development, with teardown of demo and buildup of custom information
- Content development of all pages, and single blog post writing and publishing
- Integration of site into Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools
- Setup on Google+, Google My Business, YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook
- Integration with Hootsuite for social media automation
Congratulations, you’re well on your way to building up a solid brand!
Here are quite a few things you can do to really take things to the next level:
- Rebuild again with a better theme, or unlock advanced features with the paid version of the current theme.
- Get a custom logo set up, along with banner graphics for all social networks
- Write (or have written) and schedule out several blog posts, publishing once or twice per week.
- Grab better plugins (for example the professional version of WPMU Dev, which has the pro version of WP Smush and many other useful plugins).
- Ran your site through Pagespeed Insights and Pingdom Tools to see what you can do to speed it up.
- Build up a fake portfolio or run case studies in order to attract clients.
- Start a direct mailing campaign for yourself, targeting specific areas or businesses.
- Get a legitimate phone number, or use your own, or connect a number through Google Voice.
- Build up some popups that are not annoying for things such as email opt-in for newsletters, etc.
- Get some realistic testimonials, and start doing some work for free to build a legitimate portfolio.
- Further integrate Hootsuite by scheduling out posts for news in your niche.
- Start serious follow/unfollow or automated processes for your social media accounts to build a targeted following.
- Get an address and verify in Google Local through the postcard method. I can’t stress enough how important it is to show your company as legitimate in Google.
- Get your site and brand listed on the big business directory sites in your area. These are good for potential clients, good for links back to your site, and good for links in the SERP’s to help you dominate your brand name.
- Get your schema game proper: https://pastebin.com/ETvywkTA.
- Add in an FAQ page to your site, grab some of those authority logos from places like Verisign, the Better Business Bureau, McAfee, etc. People eat that up.
Expired content from @littlewebdragon helps amp up your blog if you don't have the time to write or the budget for high dollar writers: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/high-quality-money-site-pbn-t1-articles-only-1-piece-free-review-copy-for-everyone.928708/. If you do have the budget to get some writing done, I suggest @kyescontent or @CaramelBiscuit for mid-tier prices, @ScribScribScrib for mid-to-high tier pricing, and @SensualTyrannosaurus or myself for high-priced mumbo jumbo. There are tons of great writers on BHW, though. Mix and match, test people out.
For graphics, everything I've ever reviewed from @whiteblackseo has been incredible. Here are his two threads: https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/24-hour-professional-logos-quality-logos-at-an-affordable-price-starting-at-12.956928/page-5#post-10518058 and https://www.blackhatworld.com/seo/24-hour-designs-graphic-design-solutions-in-less-than-24-hours-starting-at-15.983070/.
If you want to get PBN posts and don't want to go through the trouble of building your own up, check out the PBN's from @Lego or @splishsplash. Again, there are a bunch of good ones, but these two I have used to success.
If you want editorial posts, just go straight to the fucking source: https://www.peopleperhour.com/freelancer/penprince/m/experienced-guest-post-writer-on-au/997469.
There are so many other golden services in the BHW marketplace, the above just scratch the surface. I don't think I can write any more on this without getting frustrated, so that's it, everyone. Enjoy your new brand. The next installment won't be anywhere near this long, I promise.
Look for Putting A Value On Your Time Part 1 - Saying No, Taking Pay Cuts, And Dropping 80% Of Your Clients next month.
-SH
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