Over the past few days I have been busy building my site for the new niche content site. As discussed in Part I and Part II, the most difficult part of getting a site up and running is choosing the keywords. In terms of the amount of time required to complete the process, the building of the site is where I find the most effort and time comes in to play.

In the process of building my site I tried to identify what were considered the best practices for building a site to help with search engine rankings and click through optimization. There were really two articles that were bar-none the best descriptions I could find both in terms of content and in terms of the quality of information. The first article is written by someone who will be familiar to most of us trying to make money on the web – Yaro. For the design and building of my site I focused on Part 1 of his article that discussed optimizing the On-Page components. Here is how I approached it, keeping in mind that many of these things are dynamic and will need to be tested and re-tested to find the things that work best on the site:

1. Title Tags – For each and every page, I have tried to optimize the Title Tag for two or three key phrases that describe what the page is about. For example, Wedding Favors - Wedding Party Favors - Bridal Shower Favors.
2. Keyword Density - In a nutshell, the percentage of times your keywords appear on a given page. This one takes some research because you need to go to your competitors and attempt to match or beat the keyword density for those sites. The tool suggested was Ranks.nl to do this.
3. Site Structure - Sitemaps are important because when a search engine robot hits the sitemap page on your site, it effectively can hit every page listed. A good sitemap will provide links to all the pages on your site (or at least the most important ones), be simple (no graphics), and organized. The sitemap should also be linked to from every page on your site.
4. Internal Links - As Yaro mentions, Google treats every page as a single page, not as part of a site. Therefore, it is important that you include links to your most important pages. Also, having the correct anchor text is important – be descriptive using your keywords.

These are the best practices to help my site make money on the web. We shall see how it works. I hope to have the site up in the next week or so – you will be the first to know.