As another addition to my collection of domain names and ideas that I have, I thought it would be a great idea to document and track the process of a site created from scratch. Being a huge sports fan and also being someone that thinks they can fix any problem in the world if given enough time, I want to present an indestructable case for having a playoff system in college football. This is a hot topic this time of year, with the college season winding down and controversy season heating up, so the goal of building this site is to get it built, listed, and ranked well ASAP. Every day between now and the end of the year where this site is not able to be found is a lost day, so it’s time to get the ball rolling so to speak.
Step 1, I need to purchase a domain name. I spent a lot of time trying to find domain names with keywords built in, as this will ultimately help with immediate search engine scoring. After kicking around a few ideas, some of the best and most logical were taken by people that never built a site and do not provide accurate contact information (frustrating topic for another day). I finally settled on BCSFootballPlayoffs.com. BCS because of the current college football ranking system, and “football playoffs” because, well, that is going to be the topic of the new site and likely a target keyword for people searching the site. The word college would have been great too, but I chose not to lengthen the domain name to be longer than necessary.
So as of last Thursday I purchased the domain name ($7.82 expense) and set up hosting on a shared plan that I already own for several of my other sites. By Thursday evening we are up and running with a blank page when you go to to the site.
On Friday, I created the site in Dreamweaver and quickly slap together an index page. I put a title page on it “NCAA College Football Playoff System”, and some basic rudimentary left hand navigation. I tried to think of keyword based links for the navigation (more important than the actual pages at this point). Most of my time spent is creating the image found on the right side of the page, portraying my proposed college football playoff structure. These brackets are as of the BCS system in place on Friday evening (and before the Buckeyes were knocked from the top spot). But I’ve built the image in Fireworks and the PNG file will allow me to modify it quickly and easily every time new BCS polls are released. The image won’t be for the search engines obviously, but will provide a visual to human visitors that will ultimately be visiting the site.
I went to a couple of other sites that I own to add a text link to this new site, and labeled the anchor text as “NCAA College Football Playoff System” just as this link did, and now I get to sit back and wait for a little while. The important thing is to get the spiders to visit the page. I’ll work on cleaning up the page and adding content during the rest of the week. Until then, I can look at the site’s log files to see if any spiders have visited, and also check any email that may come to the site. I’m not expecting any, of course, because there is very little visibility to the site just yet. I actually prefer it that way, because the site is not attractive, not entirely functional, and not really worth displaying to people at this point. However, is the SE’s want to see it, that is all I am looking for at this point. At this point, I didn’t even add Google Analytics to the site, although I should have. I will do that later today.
Now I have time to truly work on the site design and layout, as well as prepare my specific marketing plan, while the site itself builds a “credit report” of existence with the search engines, being available any time they decide to crawl it.
I will post more steps and chart the progress in the next couple of days with the next steps to making this site extremely visible, and maybe share some goals for the site (shooting high with TV/radio interviews, ESPN The Magazine mention, local newspaper?). Remember, this site will be “The Authority” on why college football needs a playoff system, so I’d also be more than happy to hear some of your expectations and goals for this site, and perhaps I can incorporate them into the marketing strategy as well. The point of this blog is to show you how to grow a site from scratch, and it doesn’t matter so much what the idea is as much as the steps and actual practice of taking it big. This would be the same practice for your business or blog as well, as really only the site name would change.