In this short tutorial we’re going to see how to build a powerful niche website that Google loves. To do this we will extract some data from the very useful options panel of Google search.

Please note that this is not an exact science and the model explained below is only one model among others. It works very well but I do not claim that it is THE ultimate model.

That being said I believe the step by step explanations will be very useful to some people, especially to those of you just starting out (experienced site builders might learn a few things too).

The Google options we will use are not available in all countries, so to ensure you can follow along, use this version of Google:

Google



In this example, we’re going to pursue the “bowling balls” niche. This tutorial is not about market research or keyword research so I won’t explain how and why I have decided to target this niche.

When you want to build a new website, the first thing to do is to find related and relevant themes in the eyes of Google. Ideally you should start a new niche website with a minimum of 10 articles and add new articles on a regular basis.

Now the question is: “How to find relevant themes in the eyes of Google?”

Let Google tell us… Type “bowling balls” in the search box and submit your query. Then make sure to disable the instant results by selecting “Instant is off”:



Then click on “More search tools” like in the screenshot below:



Then click on “Related searches” in the left sidebar:



Now just look at the top of the screen, you will get ideas for different themes:



So thanks to the Related searches option we now have 6 themes (Our main theme + 5 others):

• Bowling balls
• Bowling shoes
• Bowling games
• Bowling shirts
• Bowling tips
• Bowling bags

Those themes will later become categories for the site.

Note that even though the keyword we are after is related to bowling balls, we WANT to have content about bowling shoes, games, shirts, tips and bags. This will make our site very relevant to bowling balls (in the eyes of Google) and will help us to outrank other sites while building much less backlinks than them.

If you don’t believe me, watch this video where I have proved this once and for all:
Easy Video Player » PART 5 Checking The Competition



We now need to find the topics for the articles that are going to populate our site.

Let’s build a list of related keywords for our 6 themes.

Go to https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal

(Quick note: The Adwords team and the Organic team are 2 different entities. So the 2 algorithms behind Google Search and the Google Adwords Keyword Tool are completely different. Both teams try to find the most relevant terms to one keyword through their work but it is possible that what Adwords says is relevant to your keyword is NOT what Google Search thinks. So why use this tool instead of the wonderwheel and the related searches options of Google Search? First – this Adwords tool gives us much more data and ideas. And secondly both teams are very competent and their results tend to be the same, or at least very similar).

Select the language and country you’re targeting, enter your 1st theme in the keyword box, check the “Only show ideas closely related to my search terms” option, enter the captcha code if any and click on the search button.



Then make sure the returned keywords are sorted by Relevance and select a minimum of 3 keywords (5 being better) that are not TOO similar. For example if you look at the ones I selected below, I didn’t take “discount bowling balls” because it is too similar to “cheap bowling balls”.



Also when you do this, do NOT take the search volume and the competition level into account. The article topics we are selecting now are going to help us build a website ULTRA relevant to the main keyword we are targeting, so competition level is not an issue at all at this stage.

Let’s do the same thing for the other themes… (I won’t show you screenshots as it’s exactly the same process).

My list of article topics is:

Bowling balls:

• bowling balls for sale
• cheap bowling balls
• custom bowling balls
• storm bowling balls
• kids bowling balls

Bowling shoes:

• cheap bowling shoes
• dexter bowling shoes
• kids bowling shoes
• bowling shoes for women
• linds bowling shoes

Bowling games:

• free bowling games
• bowling games online
• bowling games for kids
• fun bowling games
• 3d bowling games

Bowling shirts:

• retro bowling shirts
• custom bowling shirts
• cheap bowling shirts
• bowling shirts for men
• vintage bowling shirts

Bowling tips:

• bowling tips and techniques
• bowling tips for beginners
• bowling tips video
• fast bowling tips
• bowling tips from the pros

Bowling bags:

• bowling bags on sale
• cheap bowling bags
• bowling bags with wheels
• storm bowling bags
• brunswick bowling bags

We now need to create articles for these topics and publish them on our site.
We basically have 3 different options:

Option 1: Write the articles ourselves
Option 2: Pay someone to write the articles
Option 3: Leverage free content

Options 1 & 2 are pretty straightforward so I will not cover them here. They are the BEST options if you have enough money or time to invest.

However option 3 is also very powerful if done correctly. And this is what we are going to cover here.

Leveraging Free Content

What we are going to do is take articles already published on article directories. We will NOT break the TOS of those article directories as we will let the author boxes intact with the links made active.

But what we are going to do is add a block of unique text above and a block of unique text below those articles.

Let me show you this for the 1st topic of the “bowling balls” theme.

The topic is “bowling balls for sale”.

So we go to Google and type this in the search box:

Bowling balls for sale site:ezinearticles.com

You can do this with other article directories. What it does is return the most relevant articles for your search term from and only from the site that is after the site: command. So in our example it will return all the articles that are relevant to “Bowling balls for sale” and that are published on ezinearticles.com

The 1st one in the results being considered the most relevant one by Google.



As you can see it’s not 100% relevant to what we want. If you are not satisfied with the result, just repeat this search with other article directories.

Let’s do this with goarticles.com for example.



This one looks much better. We now need to take this article. Almost all the article directories allow you to download those articles easily. On goarticles.com just click on “Publish article”:



It allows you to copy the article with the HTML tags already placed where needed.

We then have to add a header and a footer around this article to make it unique (well not completely unique but unique enough to be able to rank that page more easily). Adding a header and a footer will also allow us to add our topic’s keyword making it even more optimized than the original article.

Here is how it would look like (note that I’m not a writer and furthermore I’m French so I apologize if my header / footer blocks are crappy – it’s just an example):

Finding a bowling ball that fits your style is not always an easy task. You need to find one with a good weight, not too heavy, not too light, with holes big enough and spaced well enough for your fingers.

You can of course just use the bowling balls put at your disposal in the bowling clubs but you would then have to content yourself on what is available which could handicap you.

On the other hands bowling balls for sale are often quite expensive. If you have the budget though, don’t hesitate to purchase your own ball as it would definitely help you being a better bowler. I have found this article from John Tasher that could also give you a few ideas:



Did you notice that John had a link titled bowling balls for sale? I didn’t check his site but maybe he offers good prices.

Anyway I hope you liked this article. You can also read our other articles if you need to find some good bowling balls (NOTE: and here you put a link to your bowling balls category).


I wrote those header and footer blocks very quickly. I didn’t have to make any research, I just wrote what I thought without knowing anything about the topic.

The advantage of this approach is that it allows you to build sites pretty quickly without having to pay for content. You just leverage the content that has already been written by other experts.

You of course have to do this for ALL the article topics that you have found in the steps above but I can guarantee that it’s much faster than writing the articles yourself and much cheaper than paying someone for writing them for you!

In some cases it can even give you better results than writing the articles yourself because those experts you are borrowing articles from have (sometimes) made some indepth research.



Instead of browsing the article directories yourself, select the articles, write different header and footer blocks and then publish them on your site (which takes time) you can check the WSO of a fellow warrior (Oz aka SMS).

He released a wordpress plugin some times ago that does exactly that. I don't have the exact url but with a search in the WSO section you should find it easily. The plugin is called Wordpress Easy Content (WPEC)

Hope you liked this short tutorial, if you have any question don’t hesitate to ask.

V2

UPDATE 2011/01/08

The "Related Searches" option has disappeared from the Google side bar for a few days now... Don't let this stop you, there are many other ways to find related topics by using Google.

I have posted one of those methods here.

UPDATE 2011/01/11

If you want to monetize your sites with adsense make sure to only use unique content as stated by MarkTX in this post. Else you could seriously get banned from the Adsense program.