About two to three weeks ago I decided that it was time to put up a new site. I’ve dabbled before in buying sites, and have even bought an occasional expired domain name. But this time I just couldn’t find a site I wanted to buy, and wanted to brand a new domain name (domain name has never been used before, it’s brand new, has no history). So, I went to my favorite registrar and bought the domain name, updated the nameservers, and set up the domain on my server. This was day one.
On day two, I set up Wordpress on the site (my content management system of choice right now) and started to populate the site with content. I edited the template with my typical “seo tweaks” like search engine friendly URLs and added my custom “ping list” of services to ping whenever I added content to the site. I think I spent about a total of 30 minutes or so, maybe 15 minutes, tweaking the CMS.
On day three I realized that I could write more content—so I spent about two hours total adding outgoing links to other sites in the niche, writing useful content that explained the industry, and adding recent news items that people in the industry are interested in reading about. This is day three now and I’m just getting around to adding more content to the site, which by the end of day three ended up being about 15-20 unique web pages on the site. I checked the domain in Google, Yahoo!, and in MSN and Google had the home page indexed—no other pages. Yahoo! and MSN had crawled, but had yet to list the domain. At the end of day three I decided “enough was enough” and left the site alone; enough content built “for now”. I did not do any link building exercises like I normally do, except for adding two or three bookmarks to the home page on my social bookmarking profiles.
On day four I did nothing.
On day five a friend of mine, in talking, mentioned that he worked in the industry—the same industry that I just put up a site about. So, I talked to him further about the industry, got some good information from him, and spent three and a half minutes adding a new page to the site with some unique content based on our conversation. Then I took 30 seconds to add another social bookmark to a few social bookmarking sites I frequent.
On day six I again did nothing, but happened to check the web stats for the site—low and behold there were thousands of visitors coming to the site. Apparently I had content on the site that people in this niche industry liked—so they suddenly were flocking to the site.
On day seven the traffic continued, and I noticed that there was more crawling activity from the bots, more activity from visitors (about the same number of visitors, thousands of uniques with them spending lots of time on the site). I added an email newsletter to the site that day and started to receive signups within about 5 minutes. I checked the site in Google (all page indexed), Yahoo! (still not even home page indexed), and MSN (home page indexed). Google’s organic search was sending traffic to the site, the site was ranking in the top 5 for competitive phrases in the industry, and what’s weird to me: people were actually searching at Google for my site’s unique name, a name I had made up about one week prior. That proved to me that the site, the domain, and the content was appearing to be “branded” in that industry.
It’s now day ten and the traffic continues. By the way, the site now has at least 80 backlinks to it (I have done no link building whatsoever except for a few social bookmarks of my own), and I’m actually considering moving the site to its own dedicated server. I may have to wait until I can respond to all the requests for advertising on the site from companies in that niche, though.
So, what’s the bottom line? I didn’t plan on going out and creating a new site that would perform so well right out of the box. I have launched new sites before, and my experience has generally been that it takes about 3-6 months before I start to see a return on my investment (with organic search traffic and a regular number of visitors every day). I personally will stop complaining about how long it takes to “age a domain” and “age content” and worry about “getting links” to a site in order to benefit from organic search traffic (mainly Google). The bottom line really comes to great, well-written content and a few other factors that I’m still trying to figure out.
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