Looking for help to get back in the game
- SEO |
I've been out of the internet game for several years and things have changed quite a bit so I was hoping to get some feedback on my overall plan. I originally posted this in with a few other things in the website design section because it all fit together but I've pulled this part out to follow the rules.
The site is Graywolf Survival
My target audience is primarily 18-40yr US Males but that's growing. It's a fairly wide niche market (preppers) but overlaps into a larger niche of outdoor and survival. I'm an expert in the field so the content won't be a problem, just the implementation, but that means I'm writing all the content myself.
I started this site about a month ago and didn't really get any content into it until about Jan6-7th or so, so I can't give you too much in the way of how things are working. I have CJ, adsense and amazon as embedded monetization. Here's what I have so far, with about 95% of it from 8-20Jan:
CJ: zero out of about 8,000 impressions
Adsense: 7,848 pageviews, 41 clicks, .52% CTR, $.57 CPC, $2.99 RPM, $23 earned.
Amazon: 13 orders, 394 clicks, 12,000 pageviews for $18.12 earnings.
I'm using the Genesis theme with an eleven40 child them on a cPanel shared system at Hosting Hawk. The theme is stock except for a lot of plugins, that will be pared down as I figure out what I want to use and what I can hardcode into the child theme. At the moment, it's extremely inefficient and slow so I'll have to do something. I don't know how well the look and layout work for conversions and portraying the site as an authority.
For external SEO, I started being active in a few related forums that have dofollow links and created a google+ author profile (which is now starting to put my pretty face on the google SERPs). I also started a facebook page for it but it's pretty bare. I'm starting to be talked about in different forums and in lists at other sites but it's pretty slow so far.
I have about 40 subscribers to the newsletter but I don't have that system in place yet. I have wysija (free version) but I want something with a better auto-responder system. No idea how to do the newsletter thing yet.
My internal SEO plan is to silo the site into two main categories (how-to and prepper gear), and a third catch-all for news and information.
The how-to establishes the site as an authority, especially in the realm of security.
The gear is where a lot of the monetization will come from, in the form of text and image links to amazon products and reviews that do the same thing but focus on a product or two.
The news&info category is where I'll write my interest-creating articles to pull in new readers about relevant or controversial topics, and where I'll just rant about stuff.
I want to somehow isolate the three sections by linking internally with dofollow links and amongst the categories with nofollow links. I'd like to use something like SEO Ultimate but I have Yoast's WP SEO installed right now and kind of like it. I made category posts yesterday that have the beginnings of content and then the categories blog posts below. I'll be using the category posts as the authority focuses for the site and to hilight certain items in each category. I still have to figure out the whole canonical thing to see how to do that best.
The main page has two sidebars. The category posts have one sidebar and the individual posts will eventually have no sidebars. My thinking is to funnel the reader into a pseudo-squeeze page. At the moment, about 10% of each unique person clicks into something on the page before they leave, on average. I think I can improve on that a bit.
One thing you'll notice is that my articles are typically 2,000-7,000 words long. I'm still trying to see what's the best way of keeping the topics being seen as an authority on the subject but not require someone a half hour of reading - plus at the moment, they get only one view of any ads so the ROI in terms of words/click is pretty low. I may break some of them into smaller sections but I'm still torn. I haven't looked into how to code google analytics yet to see what they're really doing there when they're reading or how long they're actually on a page. It's pretty crappy for that off the shelf.
I can't figure out yet the easiest way to paginate the longer posts. I'm thinking about breaking them to prev/next but the normal NEXTPAGE code isn't working. It's difficult to do research from here because so many sites are blocked.
The site is Graywolf Survival
My target audience is primarily 18-40yr US Males but that's growing. It's a fairly wide niche market (preppers) but overlaps into a larger niche of outdoor and survival. I'm an expert in the field so the content won't be a problem, just the implementation, but that means I'm writing all the content myself.
I started this site about a month ago and didn't really get any content into it until about Jan6-7th or so, so I can't give you too much in the way of how things are working. I have CJ, adsense and amazon as embedded monetization. Here's what I have so far, with about 95% of it from 8-20Jan:
CJ: zero out of about 8,000 impressions
Adsense: 7,848 pageviews, 41 clicks, .52% CTR, $.57 CPC, $2.99 RPM, $23 earned.
Amazon: 13 orders, 394 clicks, 12,000 pageviews for $18.12 earnings.
I'm using the Genesis theme with an eleven40 child them on a cPanel shared system at Hosting Hawk. The theme is stock except for a lot of plugins, that will be pared down as I figure out what I want to use and what I can hardcode into the child theme. At the moment, it's extremely inefficient and slow so I'll have to do something. I don't know how well the look and layout work for conversions and portraying the site as an authority.
For external SEO, I started being active in a few related forums that have dofollow links and created a google+ author profile (which is now starting to put my pretty face on the google SERPs). I also started a facebook page for it but it's pretty bare. I'm starting to be talked about in different forums and in lists at other sites but it's pretty slow so far.
I have about 40 subscribers to the newsletter but I don't have that system in place yet. I have wysija (free version) but I want something with a better auto-responder system. No idea how to do the newsletter thing yet.
My internal SEO plan is to silo the site into two main categories (how-to and prepper gear), and a third catch-all for news and information.
The how-to establishes the site as an authority, especially in the realm of security.
The gear is where a lot of the monetization will come from, in the form of text and image links to amazon products and reviews that do the same thing but focus on a product or two.
The news&info category is where I'll write my interest-creating articles to pull in new readers about relevant or controversial topics, and where I'll just rant about stuff.
I want to somehow isolate the three sections by linking internally with dofollow links and amongst the categories with nofollow links. I'd like to use something like SEO Ultimate but I have Yoast's WP SEO installed right now and kind of like it. I made category posts yesterday that have the beginnings of content and then the categories blog posts below. I'll be using the category posts as the authority focuses for the site and to hilight certain items in each category. I still have to figure out the whole canonical thing to see how to do that best.
The main page has two sidebars. The category posts have one sidebar and the individual posts will eventually have no sidebars. My thinking is to funnel the reader into a pseudo-squeeze page. At the moment, about 10% of each unique person clicks into something on the page before they leave, on average. I think I can improve on that a bit.
One thing you'll notice is that my articles are typically 2,000-7,000 words long. I'm still trying to see what's the best way of keeping the topics being seen as an authority on the subject but not require someone a half hour of reading - plus at the moment, they get only one view of any ads so the ROI in terms of words/click is pretty low. I may break some of them into smaller sections but I'm still torn. I haven't looked into how to code google analytics yet to see what they're really doing there when they're reading or how long they're actually on a page. It's pretty crappy for that off the shelf.
I can't figure out yet the easiest way to paginate the longer posts. I'm thinking about breaking them to prev/next but the normal NEXTPAGE code isn't working. It's difficult to do research from here because so many sites are blocked.