[Tutorial] Getting started with SEO, a Website, & Monetization

The first step is usually a cinch and can be answer by asking "what is currently the most popular" or "what is still working/profitable". Most of us use Google's Keyword Tool to find keyword ideas to get us started here. If you don't know what that is, it's located here. If you're looking to use Adwords to advertise your website, you will be wanting keywords with a LOW CPC. If you're going to be using Adsense, well needless to say the higher the CPC the better.


Social media is a good way of finding out what's popular or has been popular. You can use this site for that. Another way of finding out what's popular is using Google Trends. This would be the best one, as it has the most information available.




It is wise to create your domain so that it is related to your market/niche. Create a domain with your keyword/key phrase inside of your domain. For example if your keyword is lose body fat, you would try something like LoseMyBodyFat.com. The obvious providers are Godaddy, Namecheap, 1and1, domain.com, and Hostgator. Now, if you are starting out with no investment money, I am going to list a few free domain providers:


http://www.dot.tk/ - This is a free .tk domain, you have to provide hosting. Look at the free hosting section of this thread.
http://www.wix.com/
https://www.weebly.com/
https://wordpress.com/


There are certain elements to consider when researching your market/niche/keyword. You want to focus on the amount of searches (obviously), the keyword not being trademarked, the CPC (if you're considering PPC), and to consider yourself as a person searching for this and what you'd like to see come up in the searches. You can start off with any product in your house really. Using trigger words at the front of your target such as: cheap, how to, best, fast, or a city/state apartments, houses, realty, etc. When searching for what keyword to market with, you're gonna need a tool. Adwords can be useful as long as you know about CPC, but were searching for free options here. SEMRush is my personal favorite (has free & paid option, but free is really limited). You can also use http://keywordtool.io/ as they are similar to Adwords.


So, right now you're probably thinking that GKP (Google Keyword Planner) is your best bet. This may not be true. The Keyword Planner is good for giving you keywords that are very closely related to your keyword, but isn't that great at coming up with better keyword ideas that are within your niche market. A niche market is basically a sub-category for your niche as in: Your keyword being "Cheap Football gloves" with the niche market being things like "How to throw a perfect spiral", "Training for football", "Cheap football cleats", etc. You find these out by breaking down your niche into smaller categories as you can see.


Normally, you want to search for keywords under "only show closely related terms" setting. You can use a more broad setting for research purposes, but you don't want to base all of your research under one set of results. You can also narrow the results down to a monthly or yearly (last 12 months) basis to see the search volume & CPC. You can find a very detailed guide on CPC here.




There are two things to consider here. 1. I will be discussing site metrics and what they mean. 2. Before reading this section, it's important to consider that if you're starting your own brand, you will not want something that's already been used. If you can find a domain name that you like with a good CF/TF, that is brandable, has safe backlinks, doesn't have 100 indexed pages, and is aged then by all means purchase it. Referring domains are domains that a backlink is coming from, you will want that number to be relatively large if the domain has a lot of backlinks (100+ referring) I'm sure you've seen CF(Citation Flow) and TF(Trust Flow) thrown around here.


So, what is citation flow(CF)? Citation flow is a metric thats purpose is to determine how valuable a link in a site might be, by measuring the links pointing to it. That doesn't mean just blast your site with links, because that will end bad. Trust Flow(TF), is used to determine how trustworthy a page/URL is by measuring the quality of the links pointed to it. So if you have a strong, authoritative backlink profile, the better your TF will be. saying that the more backlinks you have with a higher TF, the better yours wil be, is true in most cases. The CF/TF ratio is to be considered as well. To determine that, you divide the TF by the CF. So, if you have a CF of 50 and a TF of 20, your ratio is 0.4.


When searching for an expired domain, you want to consider the age, CF/TF, number of backlinks, and indexed pages. To measure these accurately, you can use Majestic SEO. The most important factor when considering whether or not to buy an expired domain, is the backlink profile. If there are many spammy URLS/tons of forum posts with a low TF or none at all, obviously you don't want to buy that. When researching the backlinks, it's always quality over quantity, so if you see a big number with a lot of referring domains, don't jump to buy it without analyzing the backlinks first. Here are some places that offer expired domains:




https://www.expireddomains.net/
https://www.expired-domains.co/
http://www.freshdrop.com/
https://www.domcop.com/




Hosting is probably the easiest part of this tutorial. If you bought a domain from Godaddy and did not buy their hosting ( I do not recommend their hosting), there are many cheap & even free hosting providers. Setting up hosting just involves logging into the domain manager of the registrar and inputting the name servers of the hosting server that your hosting company provides. The name servers will take anywhere from instant to 4 hour to propagate. If they do not provide it in an email, it will be on the hosting server's cpanel. If not, send them an email. Hosting providers are listed below:


http://www.hostgator.com/ - 1 penny for the first month (search Hostgator 1penny code in google to get the first month for 1 penny).
https://centexhosting.com/shared-hosting/ - $2.95 per month but $2.21 per month if you use "BHW25" promo code.
http://www.host-stage.net/sharedwebhosting.php - $1.95 per month, has multiple low cost packages.
https://www.weebly.com/features/free-web-hosting
https://x10hosting.com/
https://www.000webhost.com/
https://www.freehosting.com


Most people write their own content or buy it from somewhere on the forum. Search article providers in the marketplace or on Fiverr if you cannot write your own content, but you must proofread any bought content before you post it. When writing content, there is a form of LSI (latent semantic indexing) that has proved to produce great results over the last few years. There isn't a set amount of words for an article or content, however, the standard is around 400-600 words while targeting 1-2 keywords with 3-5% keyword density. With LSI, writing 1000-2000 word articles while targeting 3-5 keywords that are related to your main keyword covers a wider range, and is a way to develop strong content authority. A cheap way I have found to get content is by typing my topic into google, taking the content from the first five results, and rewriting them into my own large form of content while checking the uniqueness of the finished article. You want to make sure that it is at least 85% unique as that's very important in SEO.


You can use a uniqueness checker here:
http://smallseotools.com/plagiarism-checker/
http://www.copyscape.com/unique-content/




keyword rich URL's are important. An example of this would be: www.yourdomain.com/your-keyword-here. You would want each page that you are trying to target to be like this. It is also beneficial to have a partial keyword in a page so that it reads a bit more natural. Next is your title tag, arguably one of the more important factors in onsite optimization. Start your title tag with your keyword. The closer your keyword is to the beginning of your title tag, the more weight it will hold. Next is your meta description, make sure to put your keyword or keywords in here and keep it to 160 characters. This is what will be viewable on Google underneath the Title, so make sure it's catchy. Next is your H1 tags. Wrap your title inside of your H1 tags to ensure your keyword is getting maximum exposure. This isn't a necessity, but it helps.


Next, we're going to touch on outbound links. An outbound like is using a link as a reference that isn't your domain (you can also use a separate page of your own as an outbound link). It helps to have an outbound link in nearly every article/content that you post. Next up is internal linking. Internal linking is putting a reference link for your website inside of your content guiding your visitor to another page/post on your website. Next, I will touch on your loading speed. You want your websites loading speed to be in between 1-3.5 seconds. 4 seconds is too long to wait for a site to load in my opinion and should be optimized to load faster. You can analyze your sites loading speed here: https://gtmetrix.com/
If I have forgotten anything, feel free to let me know so I can put it in here, (it's late).


A good resource for on-page factors and further elaboration is here: https://moz.com/learn/seo/on-page-factors


Before reading this, understand that you NEED diversity in your back link profile. For your first set of links (the links that are pointing directly at your money site) are most commonly Web 2.0s, which are basically just blogs. When you get your site off the ground (fully built, content written, onsite optimized), you will want to manually create 1-5 web 2.0s. After a week, add a small content rich article, a link to your website inside, and the let them age. You want to ONLY create 2.0s that are do-follow. Here is a do-follow checker and here is a list of web 2.0s. This is the part where I will recommend a couple of softwares that are offered here on the forums, use these after you manually create different links so they stick: GSA SER, Scrapebox 2.0, and RankerX. GSA is great for creating social bookmarks. You can eventually point social bookmarks to your web 2.0s, but that is not the purpose right now.


The social bookmarks will be pointed at some of your inner pages to help them get indexed faster (and having links only pointed at your homepage is silly). Blog comments are still a good way of getting link juice passed through another site. I recommend doing these manually at first so they stick. You can do this with scrapebox once you build a natural profile. Again, the point of me writing this is to show you that having a seemingly natural backlink profile is as important as diversity. Article Submissions are kind of like blog comments in the sense that you have a portion of content with a link to your site or a link to your social bookmarks on it. If you want to go the tiered route, that is up to you. It has worked for me in the past, though this way works as well. Ensure that they are do-follow if you point them to your site. One thing I need to stress is that you have a combination of do-follow and no-follow links. This is to have your site look as natural as possible. Here is a list of article submission sites.


At this point, you should be a few weeks into your link building process. You will see a Google dance. Yes, that is real, and it just means that as some links get indexed, your ranking will be effected. It is important to note that consistency is very important. Your link velocity is going to be a factor of your ranking. This is where the tools I listed above will come in handy. You need to be building these links weekly, because some of them will not stick or even be indexed. PBNs or Private/Public Blog Networks come into play 1-2 months after you have built all sets of other links, why? Because we're trying to establish a natural looking profile of links, not bunches of random links from every direction. You can either make a PBN or buy into one. I would suggest buying into one and have the links point to your web 2.0s or social bookmarks. This will help cement them and help them get indexed if they are not already. Depending on if it is a private or public blog network, you can point the links at your money site if you feel confident. This should be enough to get you started, next I will discuss social media.






I should have probably said this sooner, but you should create these once your website is finished & has content. Listing your website on each social media page will get you a nice little backlink. The important ones are: Facebook, Twitter, Google +, Instagram, and Reddit (optional). For Facebook, you will want to attract a somewhat natural following. There is a guide here that touches on how to make income with Facebook groups, it's a way to get your website noticed instead of CPA links with redirects. Twitter is easy. Just create the profile and list your website. Casually post images, post trending hashtags, and attach your websites link eventually. To gain a following, start following around 30-40 people per day and gradually increase as your followers increase.


Instagram will work the same way. There are bots for instagram and other social media if that's a route you're interested in taking. The bots on the market that I am familiar with are: MB Ingram, Followliker, and Massplanner. Google + is fading, but is still good to have for business purposes. You can follow circles of people and get your sites name out there, but it's best not to spend too much time on this. You can also use Add Me Fast to boost the likes on pages/profiles/posts as well, but don't do this too much, you don't want your social media filled with this crap. Free bots or scripts for AMF are here and here.




There are many ways that you can go about this. You can choose CPA, PPC, eCommerce (affiliate and dropshipping), memberships (forum & otherwise), optin email list generation (newsletters). For CPA, you'll need to have an affiliate account with a CPA network. The approval process is pretty standard and you'll need a website represent whatever you will be marketing for them. For CPA networks, you have Maxbounty, Peerfly, OGADS, CPALead, Clickbank, and Comission Junction. The approval process is may require a phone call while others just have a small online review process.


PPC requires you to have an email account with the company you're trying to work with. The three main used are: Google Adsense, Yahoo Advertising, and Bing Ads. Ecommerce requires you to have a merchant account to accept payments (most use paypal or stripe) and can be used in a variety of ways. For example, you can have an Amazon Affiliate website, and advertise others products and make a commission for each sale. Here is a guide to setting up an Amazon Affiliate website using Wordpress, it's great for beginners. WooCommerce comes with paypal integrated, however you will need to get a Stripe merchant account, and hook it up to your website. There are a lot of good resources at WPLIST, including a Stripe plugin.


For membership websites, there are several ways to go about this. You can use BBPress & BuddyPress & S2Member for membership, forum, and permission based access that you can charge for access to. Here is a guide for integrating BBPress and BuddyPress for a forum/membership website. Alternatives are of course, PHPBB which is a free and open source forum software. You can also use Vbulletin, but it only comes with a free trial here.

10. Are you still here?
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The only way you are going to get your projects started, become profitable, and know if this is for you is to start doing something! So get out there and make it happen. I'll answer questions here if needed. Good luck my fellow blackhatters.

That's a great and detailed tutorial I have bookmarked it so I can check it thoroughly! Thanks

"GSA is great for creating social bookmarks"

Can you go more into detail or maybe link a resource you follow on how you use GSA for creating social bookmarks and how you do it so its effective?

Will creating the web 2.0's, aging them, placing content with your link, blasting GSA links to the web 2.0's help? Is that what you meant in that step?

aBoss said:

"GSA is great for creating social bookmarks"

Can you go more into detail or maybe link a resource you follow on how you use GSA for creating social bookmarks and how you do it so its effective?

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There are lists around BHW that you can import. What you're looking for essentially is a list that you can manually test to ensure that it works, no email verification (optional really, you can just wait for the timeout). I have my own list that's been constantly switched around.

Here is a list you can check through: http://www.blackhatworld.com/blackh...6-get-1100-social-bookmarking-list-fresh.html

Here is a case study type of guide you can look over: http://www.caroline-middlebrook.com/gsa-search-engine-ranker-social-bookmarks-captcha-solving/

jiungsong said:

Will creating the web 2.0's, aging them, placing content with your link, blasting GSA links to the web 2.0's help? Is that what you meant in that step?

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Manually create the 2.0s and then let them a little. At least a week or two. then place content. You can send links to them so they get indexed fasted after they've aged, but I wouldn't recommend "blasting" them. You want the manually created 2.0's to stick and become indexed.

A nice summary of SEO

Top thread tons of information and resources. Thanks PHPInjected keep up the good work!!

I admit I am one of those people who are having a hard time understanding SEO. I've been here for 2 years now and I am still struggling learning the basics. Thanks for the guide though!

Nice tutorial OP, thanks for tools and advices.

Thanks for spending the time to write this guide.

Now it's in my Pocket.

Nice sharing.
It has useful information about SEO and how to monetize it.
Great summary.

choppa2choppa said:

Top thread tons of information and resources. Thanks PHPInjected keep up the good work!!

Click to expand...

Glad to have pointed you in the right direction.

Cherry said:

I admit I am one of those people who are having a hard time understanding SEO. I've been here for 2 years now and I am still struggling learning the basics. Thanks for the guide though!

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The only thing I didn't include was competition analysis, which I'll probably edit and put in later. Glad to help, if you have questions, feel free to pop back in.

Always add some screencast or photos of your work to let people understand well.

Ambitious12 said:

Always add some screencast or photos of your work to let people understand well.

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I'm actually going to edit in some photos to better illustrate some of the points I made. I had been typing for awhile when I wrote this out.

Not bad, appreciate the effort.

Aty said:

Not bad, appreciate the effort.

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It's a rough draft, I just wanted to get it posted. Then I am going to input some screenshots and more information to get people going.

good detailed thread, thanks for taking time writing and sharing this,
i think this should be a "Must Read" thread

Bookmarked! Thanks for taking the time to write this up for us beginners.