Using WordPress for Place Holding Sites
WordPress is one of the easiest tools you can use to begin a web site. That is why you should use it to build some of the easiest web sites to get to rank in the google search engines. The idea behind placeholder sites, or what I like to call “weeder sites” is to create a funnel of web sites that will help you realize which ideas for web sites you had were good and actually can become something, and which ones probably weren’t so good.
What is the Point of a Place Holding Site?
Place holder sites can be a very valuable commodity for people that want to test out many ideas at the same time, but do not have the time or money it takes to stop everything that they are doing at the moment and begin working on new projects. A place holder site’s main objective is to simply get indexed by Google and gain domain age – two very important parts of SEO.
The first thing you should do before creating as many place holder sites as possible is do all of you keyword research. This is because the most important part about these place holder sites is that the domain name must be an exact match for the key word. This is because Google puts a lot of weight in the domain name in terms of how they rank that web site in their search engine. Your domain name should be a keyword phrase 2-4 words long and it should not be a very competitive term (if all you are doing is trying to get indexed into Google then of course the domain name can be whatever you want it to be, but if you want to use this “weeder” system then keep paying attention). The more competitive the term the lower you will be ranked in the search engines for that term. Research as many of these terms you can, start out with say 30, and if you really want to see some magic then up that number to 100.
Creating Your Place Holding Sites
A place holder site does not require much. All you will need to is upload a simple word press theme onto your domain name to begin. After that you want to make sure that you write about 600 word of densely keyword phrase populated content and you should include 2-4 sub headings. As for links you will need about 5-10 back-links, which can all come from easily obtained free link directories, and you will need to link out to some authority web sites. You should link out to big web sites like Google, Bing, and DMOZ and you should also link out to two web sites that are the authority on that topic. Remember that your only goal is to get these sites indexed as quickly as possible and to start aging them. You should consider adding some Google analytics to see how much traffic you can pull from these simple sites
Start The Weeding Process
All you have to do now is sit back and watch. You will be amazed at how well some of these simple place holder sites will start to rank, although some of them definitely will not be doing as well as others. Each keyword phrase will vary on how Google treats them in its search engine, but if you can create a mass of these place holder sites, you will be able to weed out the ones that do not show any potential of being able to do anything in the rankings. For the ones that start ranking on the first page, you can imagine what will happen if you start to build them out a little bit! They will be at the number one spot at no time – and the best part about it is that by the time you build them out they will already have been aging for a long time!
So using placeholder sites is like automating the SEO process and has a lot of SEO benefits. It allows you to get the maximum results with the least amount of work and it allows you to do so without quitting your day job or whatever it is that is making you money for the moment. You use place holder sites to find out which of your ideas actually has potential to work out, because an idea must stand the test of time to be a good one.
Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are "affiliate links." This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission
December 16th, 2010 at 3:13 pm
Philip,
what you have mentioned is no doubt would get you PR in google but what happens when you actually have the idea and want to implement it? wouldn’t that have any effect on site?
December 16th, 2010 at 8:07 pm
The goal is not to get page rank, the goal is to gain domain name age, and get indexed. If it ranks high in the search engines easily, you know that when it comes around to implementing your idea you can build out the web site and get it to one of those top spots no problem.
December 17th, 2010 at 6:03 pm
if the goal is to gain domain age, as i am not but would ask this if I book a domain name for lets say 5 years and just host a simple html page with some h1 tags etc sort of keyword, will that work?
December 17th, 2010 at 6:05 pm
That won’t rank as well. The idea of doing everything else is that you will actually see results in the search engines.
December 20th, 2010 at 6:52 pm
ok got your point, but now I’ve a another question, if I’ve site which is doing well in google and for some reason I need to change the layout and technology say from .net i want to move to php how this change is going to effect the SERP? any idea
December 21st, 2010 at 8:45 am
It is possible that google may be alerted to see that the website chanced its IP, the layout or technology. They can assume that the owner have changed and they will monitor the changes, but if you try to keep the text, title structure the same for a while, and then start to publish new content they have no reason to penalize your website. But if the website used black or blue seo techniques when they will notice that changes are made and start analyzing your website they can penalize you.
December 21st, 2010 at 10:04 am
I plan on keeping the title and pages name almost same expect page extension will be changed from .aspx to .php, I read somewhere if you change the file name be it name without extension or just the extension, it will bring down your site to zero and you will have to start from scratch. I am first trying to access the impact and how can it be handled.
December 22nd, 2010 at 4:11 pm
That’s true, if you change the extension than Google will see the new page as a different page. But, assuming your main link juice flows directly to your homepage, which remains the same on php or asp ( unless you used some software not coded for seo at all that redirects all your visitors to yoursite.com/default.aspx ), then most of the juice still remain intact.
For the internal page, you must set up 301 redirects from old pages to new pages. You have to edit your .htaccess file on your server root and add some rules to it. It should be something like this: RedirectMatch 301 (.*)\.aspx$ http://www.example.com$1.php .