10 Steps to build a Niche SEO Empire - Part I

This post is greatly inspired by Eli’s SEO Empire. His particular post is informational in a way with powerful ways to build a highly sophisticated linking empire, in a mixed of white hat and black hat techniques, aiming to earn substantial income on the net. But in my opinion, it is full of jargon, and often too complicated for a regular webmaster to grasp it well, also the black hat mixture impose some future risks.

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What is SEO Empire? It is simply a huge group of websites, linking to each other in some way, with the purpose of improve the overall ranking by leveraging.
So this is my version of building an SEO empire. It is fully white hat (which means your website is safe under Google’s radar), focus on niche (concentrated fire power), and easy to understand. I’ve break’em down into 10 baby steps where you can implement it directly (I’ll deliver in 2 parts):

Step 1: Familiarize PHP, HTML and CSS.

This is your most important tools to succeed, if you are venturing to online business. You cannot expect others to do it for you. Because most of the time, when you want to do something right, you have to do it yourself. I’m not asking you to write a PHP application from ground up - but a basic understanding of the language, for the use of editing/modifying the source code, is crucial

Step 2: Allocate Yourself a Budget

There is no free lunch. You have to have some money in your pockets before you start. The money is mainly for hosting and domain names. So, save up some pennies ( I mean, at least RM1000) and get ready to kick some ass.

Step 3: Get Some Hosting Plans from Different Companies.

Do your hosting research well. Know which are the better (in terms of stability, support, and value-for-money) hosting companies, and sign up ALL of them. We need different class C IPs for our websites. It is best if you could have different hosting from different countries.

Step 4: A Trusted and Cheap Domain Registrar

This is probably the easiest steps. Let me help you save up some time too: go for either DomainSite, NameCheap or GoDaddy.

Step 5: Get Your Feet Wet On The Wide Variety Of Scripts

Try a wide variety of website scripts available for different purpose. This includes:

- Forum scripts
- Directory scripts (article directories, link directories..etc)
- Blog scripts
- CMS scripts
- Social Bookmarking scripts ( Digg clone)
- Video scripts (YouTube clone)
- more -

Get a dummy domain up. Install, test and play around with all these scripts. You need them to build a wide array of websites in later stage.

You can get the resources for this on any webmaster forum (You don’t expect me to spoon feed, do you?). I recommended SitePoint, DigitalPoint, and my very own WebmasterMalaysia.

(to be continued in Part II..)

Lim CS on January 22, 2008

5 Responses

    Nice article, and can’t wait for part II.

    P/S: Anything to do with StarWars?

    Chan - Exabytes on January 23rd, 2008

    Just wonder. If we register all domain under same registrar with the same personal information, those search engines can easily find out that actually all the websites are registered under the same owner by using a simple WHOIS query.

    So, even we host all these websites with different hosting companies, those SE still can find out that actually all websites belonged to one owner, right?

    siong1987 on January 30th, 2008

    You may use WHOIS Privacy to protect your domain name from been revailed to public.

    Chan - Exabytes on January 31st, 2008

    I know.. This is the only way. But, the fees for doing so are not cheap at all.

    But, why don’t we use blogger.com or wordpress.com for SEO purpose? Then, we don’t have to create so much new domains just for SEO purpose. Besides, if we create website by using blogger.com or wordpress.com, it’s easier to achieve PR in just few months.

    siong1987 on January 31st, 2008

    Chan: Because that’s the image it returned when I search for “EMPIRE” in Google Image. LOL

    Siong: Great Question. It is the same question that have been nagging all the black hat seos.

    Even if you use private whois, search engine like Google will also able to find out, because they are appointed ICANN registrar too.

    So the only option I wouldn’t be suggesting is.. FAKE IT. Put fake WHOIS information. Though I never recommend it, but it is the only way if you are concern about search engine will find out.

    But, my recommendation will be just leave it. Because:
    1. You are not building any black-hat sites.
    2. It is completely legitimate for a website owner to have multiple websites and link them together.
    3. I have done it. I have many websites with the same WHOIS info - interlink them in some way - and able to create a mini SEO empire.

    So what’s the worry? Hope that answer your question.

    Regarding the use of hosted domain like Blogger and WordPress - it is recommended to do so too.

    I’ll highlight more of it in the Part II series.

    Lim CS on January 31st, 2008

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