More and more people are looking to get into making money online. The easiest way of doing this is through monetizing a content driven website. If you are planning a website that is new, or your next site, you need to have a well thought out plan laid out.

What is your website going to offer? Why are people going to click on your site and return to your site daily? How are you going to turn your traffic into money?

Making money from a well laid out website is easy. The hard part is getting your plan in place. There are hundreds of new sites going live daily, yours will just be one of them. The only way your site will make it to the top of the Google search pages is if it is an authority site and if it is planned properly. So, where do you start?

Keywords for your Site

Keywords are the currency of the Internet. If you do not have targeted keywords, your site will get nowhere. When we talk about keywords we are mainly talking about niche sites. So, let’s take gardening as an example for this article.

If you are planning to start a gardening site, you will need to choose keywords related to gardening to drive targeted traffic to your pages.

Make sure that you break your site up into categories. Each category needs to have a niche (e.g.: gardening tools, gardening sheds, etc.). Each category then needs to have a set of keywords with one main keyword that runs across the whole site. Quick research for gardening shows that gardening is searched for more than 2 million times a month and has very low competition in terms of other sites targeting it. That will make a good main keyword. For a secondary keyword, in the “Ideas for Gardening” section, the keyword “garden ideas” has the potential of pulling is more than 300,000 clicks a month and has a low competition rate.

Get a Blog

If you are going to be selling gardening products on your site, you need to make sure that you have a blog as well. Most ecommerce systems do not come with blogging or article support. If you really want to drive traffic to your site, Google says that content is king. They are looking for sites that offer good quality content that is completely related to the industry in question.

A blog offers a great platform for creating new content daily and creating internal linking for your site. Drive traffic to your blog posts using keywords for brands on sale in your store and link that blog post to your money pages for traffic conversion.

Driving Traffic with Content

We said it before above and we will say it again: content is king. If you can write your own articles, it is a good idea to plan when you are going to do it. You will also want to plan how much time you are going to spend on content writing. If you do not have a solid plan in place you will end up pushing content generation aside.

If you find that you will not have the time to write the content yourself there are several great places online for you to get content written at low prices. The key, however, is to make sure that the content is well written and that it offers tips, ideas, and hints of an authoritative nature. Plan your content generation around the keyword research you have done and incorporate your keywords in all articles you post on your site, keeping in mind all the regulations laid out by Google when doing so.

The SEO Friendly Design

Apart from having good content you need to have a website that is, not only well laid out, but also SEO friendly. When we talk about “SEO friendly” in terms of design we are talking about a site that has well planned meta-tags, meta-keywords, and title tags. Your site also needs to make use of alt tags and descriptive title tags for images. The HTML mark-up must be clean and in-line with W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) rules and regulations. Your CSS styles need to be in a separate sheet and if your site makes use of JavaScript or jQuery, the code also needs to be in a sheet of its own and not mixed into the HTML.

Make sure that you plan your entire site, from design to content generation, before you start the development process. This is the key to the success of any site, whether you are running a niche marketing site or a large ecommerce web store. Planning a website is key.