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- Welcome 2021!
Welcome 2021!
Happy New Year! 2020 is finally behind us.
Yoyao
January 02, 2021 • Est. Learning Time: 9 minutes
FIRST…
Do you have your goals and resolutions for the new year?
A couple of my goals are to launch a new site in January and hire my 1st virtual assistant.
I originally wasn't going to start a new site, but as I kept researching keywords for this new topic for a current site, I saw the sheer size of it that I decided to put it on a separate domain.
One main reason is I wanted to spread the risk. Yes, I'll be starting from scratch with authority, but I also don't want to have too many eggs in one basket with Google's core updates throughout the year. I've been looking at small niche sites to potentially acquire and 301 to the new domain to help build authority. It's not a priority, but a nice to have if I can find a good site.
I'm also going to look for a VA to offload tasks to. I've been doing everything myself and I've seen more and more things fall through the cracks the last couple of months. Content deliveries from writers are now sitting weeks for me to format and publish, rather than hours or days.
Even though earnings have been great the last couple of months, I'm not looking to spend extravagantly because I'm expecting a Q1 dip.
Ok, now to the good stuff below with various links. There's a lot of good links this week that will help you build a solid foundation for your sites.
If you're planning to build a new affiliate website or wanting to optimize your current site, you'll want to spend some time watching and reading.
I hope that everyone has an amazing 2021!
SEO
Good look into Google's BERT, what BERT is (BERT =/= Search Intent), and what it does and doesn't do.
Ted Kubaitis, with Kyle Roof and Clint Butler, explains how BERT analyzes search queries through examples. He also looks at how to optimize SEO for BERT.
CONTENT
Chris at Niche Safari has a great tip to keep your blog posts automatically updated from year to year. After you set up the %currentyear% tag, you don't have to do anything in a year's time.
LINK BUILDING
If you're building HARO links, this is a very interesting 2-year study on link decay. They answer these questions and list out some top offenders:
How do these backlinks age over time?
Do large publications delete their old posts?
Do webmasters secretly switch Dofollow links to Nofollow?
One of the serial offenders they noted was BestCompany.com with only 14.3% of their backlinks still being good. Others included Reader's Digest, Fupping, Good Firms, and Fit Small Business.
So what types of companies give backlinks that remain healthy?
Backlinks from eCommerce, software, and service websites give the most reliable backlinks.
Broken down by DR, "Backlinks from websites with DR less than 50 and higher than 90 are more likely to decay."
They do much more analysis in their HARO backlink study. Lots of great stuff in here that you should take a look at as you build links.
EDUCATION
Clint at Digitaleer dicusses silos and how to plan out your site architecture. He uses local SEO sites as examples, but it's the same structure for affiliate websites. Replace states and cities with product categories and products.
Physical Silo - Site's structure is set by a hierarchical structure using Pages (folders). domain.com/folder/folder/page locallawfirm.com/arizona/phoenix/dui-lawyer
Virtual Silo - Interlinking creates your site's structure for Google. I like to call this a Flat Structure because all Pages/Posts sit on the same level. domain.com/arizona domain.com/phoenix domain.com/dui-lawyer
Reverse Silo - Circulates the link juice. Top of your silo (top money page) links to the pages below it.
CASE STUDY
Matt Diggity shares an update on the first 4-6 weeks after buying his latest website.
This is a great A-Z overview of not just redesigning a purchased site, but also for starting an affiliate website from scratch - site architecture, page layout for conversion rate optimization, link building, and more.
If you feel lost on how to set up your site, take a look at this article. Topics that he covers:
Site design and architecture
Technical SEO
Content optimization and creation
Monetization
Link building
Hiring
Month One results and Google’s December 2020 core update
NEWS
Good interview from Spencer Haws with Mushfiq Sarker, who has his own site and newsletter at TheWebsiteFlip.com. Mushfiq focuses on buying and selling websites.
At the 22:00 minute mark, Mushfiq goes through Spencer's OwnTheYard.com case study and gives Spencer tips on how to improve the site for maximum CRO.
Mushfiq gives Spencer some good notes. Some I agree with and some I don't. Mushfiq has his own EasyWins.io product that is a list of 100+ actions you can take after you buy a website or on your own site to increase the site's revenue and traffic - "Easy Wins."
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