[Journey] Building an authority site - Inspired by BassTrackerBoats

Disclaimer: This Journey has been inspired by Greg (BassTrackerBoats) and the following threads:
1.Authority Site SEO Case Study
2.Keyword Research Guide (external Site)

Goal:
My goal is to build an authority website in a niche that I am quite familiar with. I am going for long term rankings and eventual earnings, but not in a rush, its more about longevity.

What I have done so far:
Day 1:9/11/2014
Picked a niche
Divided it down into sub niches and also into different types ? reviews, tutorials, news etc
Then brainstormed and came up with 30 seed keywords

Day2:10/11/2014
Picked 4 authority websites in the niche
Went thorugh each of the seed keywrods, put them into the authority sites and got a load more related keywords

Day3:11/11/2014
Ended up with just under 300 keywords from day 2's task. Today put each one of those keywords individually into google adwords keyword planner and saved the results to a separate file.
After finishing that list I combined all of the exported CSV files together to give me a list of around 140,000 keywords.
Afterwards I removed all duplicates from the file and also removed anything with less than 100 searches per month.
This left me with around 20,000 keywords.

Found domain on expireddomains.net ? DA 20+, 2 years old and related to my chosen niche.
Registered domain.
Set up wordpress with theme from themforest.com
Customised the wordpress installation, installed visitor tracking and yoast, for SEO purposes.

More coming soon.

Good luck with your journey, Followed.

This is so nice to see! I'm building an authority website too atm!
Only thing that worries me is that my niche is not stable but new niches emerge every few months so there are new opportunities.
Also I have a fresh domain, how long did it take you to find an expired domain on your niche and how did you manage to find it?

Good luck! I'll be checking daily on your progress!

Heraclitus said:

This is so nice to see! I'm building an authority website too atm!
Only thing that worries me is that my niche is not stable but new niches emerge every few months so there are new opportunities.
Also I have a fresh domain, how long did it take you to find an expired domain on your niche and how did you manage to find it?

Good luck! I'll be checking daily on your progress!

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Thanks. Well, for my niche I picked something really broad so I should have plenty of options.

As for domains, it took me about an hour - but that was more because I couldnt decide which waws best out of a few I had shortlisted.
I used expireddomains.net and this guide:
http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...expired-domains-pagerank-authority-guide.html

I was primarily looking for a good domain that was niche relevent, otherwise I could have easily got something with better stats.
But the domain I picked was DA 25 I think, and a few years old.

Today put each one of those keywords individually into google adwords keyword planner and saved the results to a separate file.
After finishing that list I combined all of the exported CSV files together to give me a list of around 140,000 keywords.
Afterwards I removed all duplicates from the file and also removed anything with less than 100 searches per month.
This left me with around 20,000 keywords.

Click to expand...

Any hints on how you removed the dups? I have struggled with this.
Good luck mate, Will be following your journey as i am doing something similar

Great progress so far David. As you've Thousands of keywords to work on and still in the organization part, make sure you set up the site in Silo Structure right from the start so all the link juices you may get/build in the future are all spread across the site evenly which should greatly help in getting The Authority.

Good luck buddy!

^u yea, well, I think if it was a normal list of keywords you could use scrapebox, but If you have a tabular list like the one you get from Google keyword planner, then you can use excel as follows:

open the the excel file with the tabular data
select all Colin's with data in and click filter.
next, without anything selected, click advanced (it's in the same place as filter in 2010).
tick unique records only and leave the default of filter in place.
click the box next to list range and select the entire column of keywords only (not the column heading) - for large list just click first keyword, hold shift and control and press down arrow and it will select all keywords.
then click ok.

This will filter all records for unique only but keep the columns in order as well, for my 130k list it took 15 minutes.
but it only hides the other keyword rows, so to get rid of those permanently I copy all data to a new spreadsheet, then you have a clean list.

Day 4:12/11/2014
Today I read up on Silo structure (to be honest I didn't know that much about it).
I found this guide, which was quite helpful:
http://scratch99.com/wordpress/wp-seo/siloing/
From what I understand it is essentially building a fixed site structure that is relevant to the main keywords you are trying to target, and then building the entire site around that structure in terms of menu, navigation interlinking etc.
And lastly, removing all links (where possible) that don't reinforce that structure.
And I guess the idea behind it is that the link juice is passed down efficiently throughout your site, and also Google sees that your entire site is focused on these primary topics.

Luckily I found a nice theme from themeforest after that, which sort of already incorporated Siloing so I now have a site that is centered around Categories and the theme had build in support for creating a menu system out of those categories.

Content
I wrote and published my first article today, starting at the top of my keyword list. The article is 500 words. I am going to try and do one article per day for now, and hopefully complement that with some out sourcing of content as well.

Good luck with your journey, would you like to share the link to the themeforest theme that is already structured in silo pattern. Thanks.

T2tkid said:

Good luck with your journey, would you like to share the link to the themeforest theme that is already structured in silo pattern. Thanks.

Click to expand...

Sent you a PM with details, don't want to post it publicly.

Happy to see your way of blogging.. you are really doing the original work... best wishes for future.. I will try to follow your way of work for my next blog. Thanks

Impressive look great!! keep updates

Best of luck with this authority site, I know your site will be full of content but what plans do you have about link building.

Looks promising, good luck on your journey Davids355!
I haven't really tried doing any silo'ing myself (except by accident because it just fitted the site) but depending on how this works out maybe I should try to incorporate it into a new project of mine.

Thanks for this journey, inspired me to get started with my own authority site as well.

The SEO said:

Best of luck with this authority site, I know your site will be full of content but what plans do you have about link building.

Click to expand...

Haven't put too much thought into it yet, once I get going I may start building some web 2.0 properties focusing on some of the main sub niches (seeing as I am doing a very broad niche), and then outsource the tier 2 link building, or maybe fire up GSA for building links to those properties.

davids355 said:

Haven't put too much thought into it yet, once I get going I may start building some web 2.0 properties focusing on some of the main sub niches (seeing as I am doing a very broad niche), and then outsource the tier 2 link building, or maybe fire up GSA for building links to those properties.

Click to expand...

Also throw some PBN links in there and you will be all good

umerjutt00 said:

Also throw some PBN links in there and you will be all good

Click to expand...

Umer is right, better to throw safe PBN links first and then move to web 2.0s etc.

^^Thanks sounds like good advice.

Just a quick update on keyword research and posting content:
Randomising keyword list:
This is a bit irrelevant, but once I had my keyword list (roughly 20k terms) rather than just posting alphabetically or by search volume, I wanted to post topic each time, so I randomised the list as follows:
1.Make a new column at the end of the list.
2.Re-order to include this column in the list of ordered columns.
3.Put this code in the first row in the new column: =rand() - This will generate a random number between 0 and 1.
4.Use control and down arrow on another column to take you to the end of the data, then move across to the new column, control, shift and up to select all rows, then press control and D to autofill the entire column with the same random function.
Then order that column smallest to largest and it will put the entire sheet in random order.

Posting procedure:

For my posting procedure I am doing the following, just to get some more longtail keywords:

1.Pick the next keyword in the list that looks relevant.
2.Put that keyword in to keyword shitter and generate a load of longtail variants.
3.Put the generated list into the google keyword planner tool.
4.Save the generated list, order it by search volume highest first, then take the longest phrase that has search volume over 100.