Minimalism
Small sites = good.
Big sites = bad.
The End.
A lot of people who started out in this industry years ago are struggling with being married to their current over-sized websites or the idea of them. There are clear case studies now that prove time and time again that Google no longer appreciates the large site. So, why continue to do extra work? Google is not going to reward you for adding tons of content that will all probably end up becoming duplicate content penalties anyway.
We like 10 pages for our sites. Single page sites can and do rank, but subpages seem to stick longer than homepages for rankings. If you are going to write 20 pages of content, put it on two domains. It will give yourself a better chance of ranking both at the same time, just make sure they are on separate hosts/IPs.
You don’t need 50 plugins to configure and update either. You never, ever need to spend 10 hours tweaking a widget to appear exactly where you want it on the left or right side of the page. Spend those hours promoting your site properly by writing quality content and building killer links. If it won’t directly bring you rankings or sales, don’t do it. Remember, testing things for an increase in conversion requires traffic in the first place. No test should take that long to set up.
We need a grand total of three plugins for our new websites: Yoast WordPress SEO, Broken Link Checker and Link Privacy. There are two reasons for this. The first is that having tons of plugins just leaves all kinds of little backdoors open to hackers, bugs, and spammers. The second reason is that you just don’t need anything else to distract you from actually promoting the site.
Pages versus Posts
The first thing you need to decide when thinking about content is whether or not you want to write it as a page or a post. For a money site we always stick with pages. Posts have been harder for us to rank for whatever reason, so we have dropped them. In fact, the only time we use posts is on our branded sites that need regular updates to look legit to real people, or on our news-based sites.
Pages are timeless. It is a best practice to use pages at all times.
URLs & Permalinks
Make your URL permalink relevant to that page’s content. You can almost think about it like you are trying to come up with a one-three word title that will describe what the article is about. Of course you always want to include whatever keyword phrase you have decided on into your URL.
If you feel like you can’t include your keywords in this way because they are too long, you need to choose something different. Your permalink should never be above 3 words, and if it is above one word, they must be separated by dashes. It should looks like this: seorevolution.com/keyword-here/ or seorevolution.com/alternate-keyword-phrase/
We have some testing data that seems to confirm URLs containing more than 4 -dashes- lost rankings. About a year after we discovered the -dashes- correlation, we discovered in Google’s EWOQ guide that URLs with a lot of dashes are spammy. It’s a best practice to avoid 4 and 5 word phrases.
So you should have:
yourdomain.com (page)
yourdomain.com/main-keyword-here/ (page)
yourdomain.com/related-keyword-here/ (page. Remember this isn’t a long tail, it’s a totally different keyword)
etc. up to 10.
Or:
yourdomain.com (page)
yourdomain.com/broad-keyword/ (page with child pages linked outward. Easier to disperse link juice.)
yourdomain.com/broad-keyword/money-keyword/ (child page)
etc. up to 10.
Do not overcomplicate this. If you run a site: command later and find extras or duplicates, fix it.
Controling the Crawl
There are some very simple steps you can take to control how and when Google crawls your site and therefore lessen your chance for a penalty before you are even finished working on the site. The “Hello World!” post and sample pages generated at the default WordPress install will be crawled and will penalize you if you don’t delete them. Don’t neglect those little things. It’s RCS at the least.
You can also set up a quick sitemap with Yoast and assign priority to your pages in the advanced tab on each one. However if you have really built your site correctly it should be so small and simple that you don’t need a site map at all to be discovered. You want to assign your money page at a .5 or .6 and everything else a .1 or .2. It is vital to understand that the money page is your top priority at all times because it is the only thing on the site that matters when it comes to ranking. It is first in your menus.
The Bare Minimum
Always aim for the bare minimum. There are rarely bonuses for going above and beyond for new sites. Why go above and beyond when it’s going to get nailed with a penalty anyway? Sometimes we just use the default Genesis theme and wait for it to rank before we spend time designing a beautiful site.
Old sites need the bare minimum, too. There are so many old sites with incredible amounts of real contextual powerful links… but with all the junk on the domain, combined with poor on-site structure, it completely kills the chances of ranking.