PHPBUILT's Idiot-Proof Guide to Authority Site Building

Bluearrow said:

Awesome !

Bigger the articles get it's hard for me to keep keyword density low and keep everything related. Anyway do you make all your site artists with 400+ words or you have any rules for this ?

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If I'm targeting 1 keyword its usually 400 words to start. If you're shooting for a couple of its longtails you have to write more.

For instance.

Lets say I'm trying to rank for Yellow Pumpernickel. I want to rank for Yellow Pumpernickel Jackets, Yellow Pumpernickel Jeans too, all in one post.

If I were just doing Yellow Pumpernickel, I'd keep it at 1.5% on a 400 word post and be done with it.

However, when you introduce longtails of the same keyword set ... it gets tricky. If you want to rank for "Yellow Pumpernickel", you need to segregate that without modifiers using a stopword, like and, to, from, or a verb.

This is good to rank for Yellow Pumpernickel: "My favorite type of clothes is Yellow Pumpernickel." That's perfect, 100% weighted to "Yellow Pumpernickel".

This is horrible: "I'm going to the mall to buy some cool Yellow Pumpernickel clothes". Why does that suck? That's 100% weighted to "cool Yellow Pumpernickel clothes". You'll rank great for that term afterwards. Unfortunately, nobody googles "cool Yellow Pumpernickel clothes". There you are now, ranking for a term that nobody searches for, because you didn't segregate your money term to be weighted at 100%.

Where it gets complicated is when you start trying to add in modifiers. To rank well for "Yellow Pumpernickel Jeans" and "Yellow Pumpernickel Jackets", you need to use them in text where they are weighted properly. This is a great sentence: I want Yellow Pumpernickel Jeans, they look great on me." Because its separated by a verb and comma -- 100% weighted for Yellow Pumpernickel Jeans. You do the same with this: "Another thing that looks great on me is Yellow Pumpernickel Jackets." Separated by verb and period. Now the bad part ... you just contributed a bunch of "Yellow Pumpernickel" to the page, elevating its keyword density, but only partially weighted towards "Yellow Pumpernickel". You can't rank a page optimally on partial weighting of words in content, you need to use the exact words you want to rank for.

This is where it gets tricky. You have to pull off sentences like this: "My favorite brand is Yellow Pumpernickel.", AND fit in all your longtails you're shooting for with modifiers like jackets and jeans ... AND keep it at a low enough keyword density so you're not stuffing.

How do you do that? You write more words. You can't rank for all 3 of those with a 400 word article, now you're looking at a 800ish+ word article to effectively target your main keyword weighted at 100%, as well as your longtails weighted at 100%.

One way to cheat, if you're lazy ... is you can target your root at 100% (Yellow Pumpernickel) and then only reference Jackets and Jeans as single words. That's really not the best way to do it though. If you want perfect content you'll have to weight your keywords properly, keep the 3 word combos around less than 1% and your 2 word combo at 1.5%.

Yeah, I know I never mentioned the concept of weighing your keywords and segregating them with stopwords before -- there's a lot to onpage SEO. Now you know hehe.

phpbuilt said:

Shortly before I started this thread, I started my next authority site. I published the first 10 articles right around Nov. 25 and started getting traffic on the 27th.

Right now it has 30 articles, and its now up to 60 visitors a day. What I show above is organic traffic from Google.

Everything I'm chasing after is buying keywords. Virtually no one gets to my site that didn't type in some sort of query implying they're about to buy a product. With the price range I've selected for the products I write about ... I know that every visitor I get from Google is worth around 15 cents, whether or not they buy anything. If 100 people visit my site, I make $15, if 1000 visit, I make $150.

Right now I'm up to 60 visitors from Google a day, and the site is making sales. At an average of 15 cents per visitor, the site is averaging $9 per day (not exactly, but I know this industry well enough to know by the time I have 1k visitors the site will make $150+ per day).

Consider the power of this for a moment.

I wrote 30 articles. Most people writing wholesale articles are getting $5 for a 500 word article. That's $150 in their pocket for writing 30 articles.

Compare that to this scenario where you're building an authority site.

These 30 articles are on average making me $9 per day right now (60 visitors per day from Google * .15 cents per visitor). That is $270 a month. Every article I wrote is almost making me $10 per month.

And I haven't even backlinked yet.

You can flip a site for 12 months of its current income. Although I would have to let the site "prove" itself by averaging a certain amount of money for a length of time -- as-is the site with its current income could flip for $3240 ($270 * 12).

$3240 for writing 30 articles. That's over $100 per article folks.

However, I won't probably flip it until its aged a year, so in reality I get to make 1 years income, and then flipping it -- makes that $100 per article closer to $200 per article.

Would you start writing for $200 an article?

Of course, you need to do keyword research, write really well, continually fix areas of your site that aren't performing. But, its a good ROI.

And I haven't even backlinked yet. Someday I will. And it'll be worth more. That's the power of authority sites.

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From where you get 15 cents per visitor?

Just wanted to thank you sincerely for this post. I'm quite experienced in SEO, but there were a few of my client's pages that simply wouldn't rank, even though he has a huge domain authority, 14 years of age, and is basically a leader in the sector. Then, I found out that their writer (usually, I give them the list of LSI terms and tell them how to write the article, but they write it, since they're the experts in the field), keyword-stuffed the article lightly, meaning, the article had around 2.5% keyword density, so I just removed some of the words in the phrase without changing the meaning.

Needless to say, over night the page went from #16 to #1. Incredible.

Nice guide phpbuilt lot to learn from this,thanks

jurky said:

Needless to say, over night the page went from #16 to #1. Incredible.

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You're welcome! Glad to help out.

Google fixes pages fast when you fix the keyword density, I've seen fixed in literally 1 hour, and if its taken longer than 48 hours I know I didn't fix it well enough.

Congrats on the fixed rankings.

leonte said:

From where you get 15 cents per visitor?

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If you are pursuing valuable, buying-intent keywords, your traffic will be worth this much on an endless supply of keywords. Target buying keywords on products. This type of traffic comes more difficult, but its more valuable.

You'll have to discover your own niches for what is profitable, but I can tell you that pretty much anything where the products sell for $40+ can be valuable 15cent or better traffic.

any updates on the web2.0's list

I don't know that I've ever heard anyone talk about "weighting" regarding keywords, and every thing you've written just makes sense. You're giving the keys to the kingdom now, my friend.

Let me know how to transfer all rep to you, PHPBuilt Excellent post, excellent advice and, most importantly, based on personal experience throughout many months and possibly years.

Looking forward to many more of your posts and articles.

I'm going to claim this article here and link to my blog. Reason I'm doing this is to help DMCA takedown any idiots who are bound to copy/paste this guide and claim it as their own. http://www.weirdseo.com/how-to-build...ity-sites.html.

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Already stole it and am killing on Clickbank with an e-book of it. (/jk)

Your Training Us... I like it.
The On-Page information I have played with prior. You can do the same thing when you are building contextual links in articles and then blasting a site with them. Lots of different ways that keywords weighting and on page value are important.

Content writers are a MUST if you pull off the Authority Site

finerpleasures said:

could you shed more knowledge on common words and stop words

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You have your "money keyword" that you want to rank for. If that is singled out in content without adjectives or descriptive modifiers, the sentence is geared towards ranking for that keyword.

If, however, there are adjectives affixed to that keyword -- you will tend to rank only for the keyword with that modifier attached to it.

Stop words are elements of a sentence, usually connecting other parts of the sentence, which are extremely common and Google uses them as a cut-off within the sentence.

"I'm a great SEO". That would theoretically rank for "great SEO", and would not easily rank for "SEO". On the other hand, "I am a SEO", would more easily rank for "SEO".

Do not modify your keyword in sentences unless you want to rank for that modifier only.

You know, it is posts like this that make me wish that I was phpbuilt. ;-) Good stuff man, this has given me a few ideas for some on-site stuff that I'm going to test out this week.

Also, this can never be said enough:
Blog network that advertises itself on blackhat forums and generates backlink reports: 100% threat
Blog network that advertises itself on blackhat forums and doesn't generate backlink reports: somewhat threat
Blog network that advertises itself on blackhat forums, but has limited signup and closes when full: limited threat
Blog network that barely advertises itself, except through word of mouth: virtually no threat
Blog network that you own yourself: no threat

I have 50 articles up so far and now starting the "grooming" process. Just checked a few and all are found #1 for there unique search term but not even in top 200 for the main term. Does this mean the articles are over optimized and KW density needs to be reduced?

Also no external links to the site so far. Articles are 600-700 words long. 3 word Keywords at roughly 1.5% density

Getting late here, if I haven't answered your question yet I will in the morning. Good luck everyone.

Is it common for rankings to drop and then rise back up after reducing the keyword density?

I had a page that was ranked on page 4 with only internal backlinks, I reduced the keyword density from 2.8% to 1.4% and the page dropped down to page 5. It's been about 48 hours since I made the change.

crazedspyker said:

Is it common for rankings to drop and then rise back up after reducing the keyword density?

I had a page that was ranked on page 4 with only internal backlinks, I reduced the keyword density from 2.8% to 1.4% and the page dropped down to page 5. It's been about 48 hours since I made the change.

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phpbuilt also said you need to check your inbound link anchor text.

finerpleasures said:

phpbuilt also said you need to check your inbound link anchor text.

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The inbound links are all varied (no exact match - just related and natural phrases from other pages).

I'm just a bit confused because the page actually went lower in the rankings after reducing the keyword density. I guess maybe I just need to wait a bit longer for it to settle. I'm thinking it could be the transitional ranking algorithm or something at play.