Egor Abramenko, Technical writer at Travelpayouts

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10 easy steps to create a website

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10 easy steps to create a website

Table of contents Part 1. About website creation .......................................................................... 4

What is this course about? ............................................................................... 5

Process organization ........................................................................................ 6

Part 2. Website development plan ..................................................................... 8

Part 3. Choosing the domain name and hosting ............................................. 10

Free domain and hosting ................................................................................ 10

Free hosting pros ...................................................................................... 10

Free hosting cons ..................................................................................... 11

Hosting and domain purchasing ................................................................... 11

Hosting purchasing .................................................................................. 11

Domain registration .................................................................................. 12

Part 4. Domain registration and hosting set up ............................................... 13

Part 5. WordPress installation and setup ........................................................ 20

Install WordPress on your site ....................................................................... 20

Plugin installation for WordPress ................................................................... 21

Dropbox backup ........................................................................................ 22

Table of contents plus .............................................................................. 23

Wp super cache ........................................................................................ 23

Yet another related posts ......................................................................... 24

How to choose the theme ............................................................................... 24

Part 6. Find someone to create the semantic kernel ....................................... 25

Preparation ...................................................................................................... 26

Seeking a doer ................................................................................................. 26

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10 easy steps to create a website

Part 7. Search for a copywriter ........................................................................ 28

What you should do before you start looking for a copywriter .................... 28

Fantastic website authors and where to find them ...................................... 29

Finding website authors — first-hand experience ......................................... 29

Copywriting company – FAIL ................................................................... 29

Copywriter forums – FAIL ......................................................................... 30

Copywriter marketplace – bingo! ............................................................. 31

A price per article ............................................................................................ 32

Work with the copywriter ................................................................................ 32

Part 8. Where to go to get photos and videos for a website ............................ 33

What if you accidentally have no photos? ..................................................... 33

Process images before putting them on the site .......................................... 34

Part 9. How to develop and improve the site ................................................... 35

Indexation of the articles on the travel site ................................................... 35

How to connect Google Analytics and Yandex.Metrica ................................ 36

What if the traffic is still low? ......................................................................... 36

What if the website is okay ............................................................................. 37

Part 10. When to place affiliate links and widgets .......................................... 38

When should you start earning from the website? ....................................... 38

What do you do after you’ve filled your articles with the affiliate tools? ............ 39

How to generate ideas for new content ......................................................... 39

Instead of the conclusion ............................................................................... 40

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Part 1. About website creationIn the first part of the Travelpayouts guide to developing your own website for the novice webmasters, we are going to deal with all the steps – from technical issues (hosting, domain, content management system, etc.) to website content and further project development.

From this point onward, we’ll explain the process through an example of a small profit-generating travel website.

The idea to create a training course hasn’t come out of blue - we’ve always felt the demand for it from novice webmasters. However, it took time for us to structure our own lessons learned.

Now, let’s think of the all ways to earn on travelling. Here are several:

• Theme-based website creation

• Traffic arbitrage

• A blog with unique offers and life hacks

• A social media account

• Paid travel services delivery

• Opening a travel agency (as a bigger version of the previous point)

Now it’s time for the cold truth – the same approaches might work for some of you and not for others. The only way to discover it is testing! So, walk yourself through its paces.

For first timers, the best way to jumpstart into travel blogging is to describe a particular region. Tell about interesting routes, the best accommodations, sights to see and different local specifics. To win people’s trust and gain loyalty, remember to share your own impressions. Today, it’s the only way to make your content engaging.

A thematic site may not result in huge cash flows. However, it’s still a leading choice to start making money online in the travel niche.

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What is this course about?

It would be rather difficult to write a step-by-step plan on creating a site without a real case study example. That’s why we decided to go all out and to divide this course into several parts to consider all the issues (hosting, domain and hiring and managing authors) that concern aspiring webmasters.

You’ll get A-to-Z information from within this guide on how to build and run an income-generating travel site.

First of all, let’s define the criteria for success:

1. Completeness: Include no less than 30 pages of useful travel information.

2. Diversification: Include sections with routes, hotels, car rentals and transfer offers, insurance and sightseeing opportunities.

3. Searchability: The website is indexed and properly ranked by Google and other search engines.

4. Profit: The website contains Travelpayouts partner tools and generates income.

The final point was added for a good reason. While it is quite easy to design a 30-page travel website with affiliate tools, the main challenge is to gain quality traffic that converts into sales.

Within this course, we’ll discuss all ways to adhere to these criteria.

Sign up in Travelpayouts

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Process organization

To even the odds, we’ll only use our own resources and involve freelancers that any webmaster might find. For the same reason, the budget was limited to $500.

Note, that a smaller budget is not an obstacle to create your own site, but it is a reason to handle more by yourself instead of incurring costly outsourcing expenses.

For the proper performance tracking, we’ll use Trello, a web-based project management app. It allows the creation of task boards (for sub-projects like copywriting or design) with statuses and task cards. Check the details on the internet.

Our custom setups look like this – every column is a separate task status:

• To do – Planned tasks or backlog.

• In progress – Issued to a freelancer or we are working on it now.

• To check – Work is done but not checked (always review the job and request edits when the result does not match your requirements).

• Done – The task completed.

By dragging cards column to column, we manage tasks and watch how far we have to realize the goal.

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This is what our board actually looks like at the beginning:

For those who are keen on efficiency and psychology, we recommend creating tasks for each little issue regarding the project. You will get loads of work done — even if you feel you’re progressing slowly.

This is the last time we will touch on task management — feel free to follow the performance tracking logic that pleases you best. Having a project management tool is not required but it might be crucial for many of you. Don’t hesitate to try other tools. There are plenty of them on the internet. (Even old-school Google Sheets suits this demand!)

Now, we’re ready to move on.

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Part 2. Website development planThis section is all about our plan for world domination website creation.

The main steps are:

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Buy a hosting and domain name for your site. Certainly, public domains look appealing, but experience shows that search engines undervalue these websites and abandon them at the top of search results.

Install WordPress. You can use other CMS, but since we are going to monetize our website through Travelpayouts, the special plugin for WordPress will be helpful.

Select a website theme and install a minimal set of plugins. The article “11 Themes and Templates for the Tourist Website on WordPress” and some free themes (for those that are not ready to invest a lot at the start) can help with theme selection. The article “Best Plugins for Your Travel Site on WordPress” will help with the plugins. And we are back at it in the next parts.

Build the website structure. Think of each section and its content - it is like a mini-plan on the site’s development.

Research keywords. All your articles must be based on these keywords to generate traffic and, therefore, conversions, so your content motivates visitors to move down the sales funnel. We’ll research keywords using the Keyword Planner.

HINT! Hire a freelancer to form the semantic kernel and save time.

Write articles (or find a freelancer to write them). Write texts based on the keywords and check their uniqueness using services like www.copyscape.com.

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Place articles on the website. On this stage, publish texts on the site, find supplemental images and add them to the article.

Wait. Do not add search forms or links to the articles right off the bat. The records show that search engines tend to kick out websites oversaturated with affiliate tools.

Add metric and analytics. Use Yandex.Metrica and Google Analytics to track and analyze visitor behavior.

Add Travelpayouts affiliate tools. Go from something in mind to something of the kind to allow visitors cut to the chase (to reserve tickets and hotels, rent cars or order transfers) after they’ve read the materials. Remember to take a one to two months break before proceeding to this step.

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The following articles might be helpful:

• How to make money from a travel blog

• Creating and Monetizing a Travel Site

• The personal experience of developing a travel website from scratch: mistakes, thoughts and ideas

• The cost of creating and maintaining a travel blog

Therefore, we are ready to move on to the next part – the choice of the domain name and hosting.

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Part 3. Choosing the domain name and hostingThe first step in creating your own travel site is choosing its location. There are free and paid options. Each has its pros and cons. Our personal advice is to use the paid variant. Regardless, we pay attention to both in this article.

Free domain and hosting

You can use search engines to get free hosting and domain. Read our guide on how to start a travel blog. There are tips for finding a good hosting.

Or you can use landing page creators. These types of services usually provide free domain and free hosting. For example:

Free hosting pros

Price You don’t pay a cent for hosting or domain.

Website builder A convenient and straightforward tool that even a rookie could power through.

Domain name free You get a domain like YourName.HostingName.com as a gift.

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Free hosting cons

Advertising The hosting provider’s ads will be displayed on your site.

Limitations Most of the free packages don’t allow implementing a side code. That means you will be restricted in using cool tools from Travelpayouts.

Low ranking in the search results There are plenty of sites built on such services (frequently poor quality) that’s why search engines are reluctant to display them in search results. Even if they do accept your site, they place it below that site based on the usual hosting.

Hosting and domain purchasing

You can buy a domain and host from specialized companies. Use special comparison charts to choose the right one that meets all your needs. Let’s look through some versatile examples.

Hosting purchasing

• FastComet – Flexible tariffs, website builder, free domain, convenient hosting control panel.

• SiteGround – Affordable tariff for one site, great for WordPress websites.

• A2 Hosting – High-speed servers, responsive support and high level of stability.

• Hostwinds – Cheap tariffs, convenient account, responsive and fast support service.

In our view, those hostings possess optimum Price-Quality ratio. Surely, we’re aware of the hosting giants, but this awareness might be unreasonably expensive. Whether you need it or not is up to you.

Note: Search engines prefer sites with security protocols (their link starts with https but not http). Many hosting providers offer free SSL certificates for non-commercial sites. We have already prepared the guide on how to migrate from HTTP to HTTPS.

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Domain registration

Many hosting providers offer free domain name for a year for paid hosting, which is a sweet spot for website first-timers. A year is enough to discover whether the site generates income or not. If you fail – don’t pay for the next year. If you succeed – you should prolong the domain name and host.

When registering a domain, consider the cost of its extension. In many cases domain name registrars offer a rather affordable registration, but the extension price might be triple.

Here are some domain name registration services (from the huge variety of them).

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Part 4. Domain registration and hosting set upWe will not go over the registration process in the hosting services in detail — you can always find that on the web. We’ll cover the example of registering the domain name and setting up the hosting.

We will use GoDaddy hosting to show the whole process.

Tip: The domain name should contain an easy-to-remember word or phrase. At the same time, the domain must be unambiguously readable, so that a person can type it in the address bar without errors.

For example, we chose the name GDEALTAI.RU for our site, since we are going to make a site about holidays in the Altai region (Trust us, in Russian, this domain name rocks).

Note! Each hosting provider and domain registrar has a support service that is ready to help customers quickly. Feel free to ask them questions.

Go to the hosting section and click Add to card for any hosting plan.

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Choose the period of domain registration and other necessary options. Click Continue With These Options.

Enter the name of your new website.

Select the domain name for your website.

Enter billing information and send money for a domain and hosting by clicking Complete purchase.

If everything is okay, you will see the Web Hosting admin panel.

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Click on the web hosting name (Web Hosting with cPanel New account) and type your domain name on the new page.

Choose a place for the data server.

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Create a WordPress website. Create a username and a password for the WordPress admin panel.

If you need to, you can add an email address for your website, or skip this step.

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When the process is finished, click Set Up My Site.

On the opened page, click on the WordPress icon.

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You will see the interface of WordPress set up. Click Start Wizard.

Select a website type. (Industry, title and tagline.)

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Enter your contact information or skip this step:

Choose a design for your website (don’t worry, you can change this later):

After that, you will see the standard WordPress administration panel.

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Part 5. WordPress installation and setup

Install WordPress on your site

The installation and initial setup process has already been described a million times on the diverse websites. That’s why we won’t dwell on this. Here are general steps and recommendations:

1. Download the WordPress archive from the official site.

2. Copy the archive into your site’s folder via your hosting web interface or the client’s FTP and unpack it.

3. Remove files from the folder WordPress into the main site’s category where you’ve saved the archive.

4. Create the users database (that is available via hosting control panel).

5. Get to your website. The WordPress installation process will start. Important! For authorization in the administration system, DO NOT use variants such as admin or administrator for the username. Anybody can try to get around a password using those first.

6. Run through the installation steps. Note! Always specify a valid email address. It might come in handy one day if you forget your password.

HINT! Create one more user account with administrator rights directly upon the WordPress installation. Use this new account for work leaving the first account on standby. To do so, surf the Users section in the WordPress console.

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Some hosting providers offer WordPress installation in one click right from the hosting control panel. However, manual WordPress installation is usually more secure as you always know the version you’ve installed and you’re sure that no one has changed it.

Plugin installation for WordPress

Once WordPress is installed, switch to the plugins installation. Plugins are the part of WordPress that makes your work easier – they’re not required, but they improve your project.

We’ll show the minimum set of plugins that are necessary to implement at the beginning. (After you click the link, the archive with the listed plugins will be downloaded.) You can find a number of articles with various plugins overviews on the web.

1. all-in-one-seo-pack – An easy and fast way to optimize your WordPress site for SEO.

2. better-wp-security – Over 30+ ways to secure and protect your WordPress site.

3. dropbox-backup – Automatic savings of all files in Dropbox (but first create a dropbox account).

4. google-sitemap-generator – Creates Google-friendly sitemaps.

5. table-of-contents-plus – Automatically creates a context specific index or table of contents for long pages.

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6. wp-smushit – A powerful WordPress image smusher.

7. wp-super-cache – An easy content optimization tool that makes websites work faster.

8. yet-another-related-posts – Automatically displays related posts to make people stay for longer on your site.

9. Travelpayouts – Helps you profit from an affiliate program and monetizes your travel traffic. Download the latest version here: bit.ly/travelpayouts_wp.

Each of these, and a range of other plugins, are in the official library.

After the installation, some of the plugins need an additional setup.

Check the screenshots below to get an idea of how to set up these plugins (if there are no screenshots, use the default setup). There is a documentary for every plugin to customize them on your own.

Dropbox backup

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Table of contents plus

Wp super cache

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Yet another related posts

How to choose the theme

Until your site starts earning income, you can select any free theme — fortunately, there are plenty on the internet. For those ready to invest in a theme, we recommend the article “11 Themes and Templates for the WordPress Travel Site.”

We chose a Customify theme for our site.

Start filling your site with content after you’ve set it up.

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Part 6. Find someone to create the semantic kernelSemantic kernel (aka, semantic core, query kernel) is a set of words and phrases (usually called keywords) that people enter on search engines to find websites related to a particular topic. Composing of the semantic core is a crucial part of website development, because it makes it useful for people and gives it a high SEO ranking.

For example, when entering the phrase “Flight affiliate program” in the search line, you see Travelpayouts.com in the forefront.

The same thing is true with other subjects matters. Meaning, if you order the semantic core on the theme of flight tickets, the keyword “cheap flight tickets” is compulsory.

The semantic core is required for a new website to adjust the articles to the queries the users enter in the search engines.

As a rule, the semantic core looks like a table with keywords and phrases with their search frequency. The table includes other useful information related to the number of main pages in the top ten according to the certain query, the competitors, and so on. The semantic core can be divided into groups or topics.

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Most often, the queries’ clusters are built on the principle of the main query, plus its tails. For example, “How to fly to Egypt” is the main query and “in 2019” and “non-stop” are its tails.

More information about the semantic core can be found on the internet.

Preparation

Before composing the semantic kernel, some groundwork is required. Because we have no website yet, we should create a document with a brief description of its components and content to help the semantic-kernel creator understand the essence of our project. For this purpose, we should compile the following information:

• Who we are creating the site for (the target audience)

• The type of site it is: News or e-commerce (since both options work for you, write about the content and the ways you want to monetize this content in detail)

• Keyword requirements (young projects should focus on less-competitive, low-frequency queries because only few website owners use them so there are no articles on these topics – the niche is unoccupied!)

Seeking a doer

The best location to find a doer is the Warrior Forum. However, you can certainly use Google.

There are plenty of offers on that forum. To avoid advertising, we’ll give some recommendations for finding a freelancer:

• Collecting low-frequency queries should be included in the freelancers list of services.

• Ask the freelancer to filter the highly competitive queries (but this is not necessary if you describe an unknown region that lacks such information in the search engines).

• Sometimes you can ask them to draft meta titles and descriptions for every page of the website.

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• Read reviews about the freelancer’s work. If some are negative or if any other issues make you feel uneasy, check on another candidates.

• Ask about the price of the semantic core for 50 articles (the average number for a new website). If the price is higher than those mentioned on the forum, then keep on searching. Those who have fibbed in the advertisement will fib when working.

Before sending a big order, it may be useful to ask for a test task or sample to assess the quality.

Some useful tips:

• Always review the work done.

• Some SEO experts might be happy help you with technical specification for copywriters for an extra fee.

• The keywords should be grouped.

• If you include keywords with frequencies which are too low (1-5 occurrences) and grouping them into the same cluster, you can delete them or write such articles later.

Don’t order a tremendous semantic core at once if you’re not ready to write all the articles. Despite the eternity of some queries, the situation could change. As long as the collected queries are ending, order a new semantic core.

When the semantic core is ready, you can start writing articles using collected keywords or find a good author who will step in for this process.

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Part 7. Search for a copywriter

What you should do before you start looking for a copywriter

In this article, we deal with the search of, and the cooperation with, a copywriter who may write articles for your site.

We won’t consider writing articles independently. A good text requires time and experience. If you have them, feel free to write them yourself. If you’ve never written articles about traveling before, you couldn’t possibly handle it better than a skillful writer. However, if you have the time and desire, nobody is preventing you from trying it.

So, we already have the semantic core. It is desirable to divide it into groups, so each group of the key words is for a certain article.

We recommend writing a statement of work (SOW) for every article. Describe in several sentences everything you want to see in the article.

Usually, experienced writers enhance articles with additional info — i.e. if it is an article about sightseeing in any city, a good author can add their locations and addresses. This is not, however, their obligation if you haven’t written about it in the task. Remember to only demand the execution of tasks that you’ve included in the SOW.

Here is a sample SOW

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Fantastic website authors and where to find them

When the SOW is finalized, start searching for a copywriter. Below are three ways to find them:

• Look at copywriter marketplaces.

• Check copywriting companies.

• Search on freelancer websites.

Working directly with the writers is the best money-saving option. Find them on forums and freelance websites. This way, you’ll avoid paying marketplace commission and, at the same time, lose their support against a low-quality job.

Finding website authors — first-hand experience

Copywriting company – FAIL

The agency that created a semantic core for me recommended a copywriting company. I took their advice and wasted an entire month corresponding with them via email and waiting for the first articles.

Even though the first article was written for free, I wasn’t satisfied because it had been written for search bots with the keywords and third-rate texts around them, rather than real people. Overall, this article did not look interesting and was unexciting for the real readers.

Once I shared an example I personally liked with them, the article was rewritten and I loved the result. So an important lesson was learned — show examples of what you really want, even if you are working with professionals.

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Because I had a mishap with the first article, I was not sure if everything would go smoothly with the agency. That’s why I suggested work on a partial pre-pay basis instead of paying the full price upfront. After I had submitted a prepayment, I waited for results. I was waiting for three weeks even though they promised to finish in a week. Moreover, they hardly responded to half of my requests, convincing me that the articles were in progress.

As a result, they sent me poor quality articles that were hard to read and seemed useless. They rejected all of my edits and also refused to pay back the money. That’s why I decided to stop wasting time and effort and started looking for another author.

Copywriter forums – FAIL

After speaking to the experts, I decided to search for an author on forums. It depends on your project’s language whether you should look on local SEO forums or surf the overall web.

I contacted several reasonably priced authors with positive reviews — an only half of them responded. After reviewing a test task, I focused on one author, who was keen on writing, knew WordPress and was able to publish finished articles on the website.

Suddenly, after all our negotiations, the author pointed out he would be able to start in two months due to his loaded schedule. What the hell? I was madly disappointed that he didn’t mention it before we started discussions.

Ok, never mind, move on.

Two more weeks were wasted and I had to restart the process again.

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Copywriter marketplace – bingo!

This time, I decided to try a different approach and looked to a copywriter marketplaces. The choice of authors depended on the following criteria:

• Travel-focused content

• Author has positive reviews

• Author provides examples of their work

After checking their samples, I selected twenty authors with quality texts, signed up on the marketplace platform and sent them job offers. Ten of them replied and three were ready to cooperate.

I assigned them a test task — fortunately, all of them managed to write good texts, so I just chose the first one who submitted the test. A small hint — you can always contact the authors directly to work without any middlemen, so I did.

Eventually, this author wrote almost all the articles for the site. He even agreed to select images and publish articles at an additional cost. Awesome!

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A price per article

The text’s quality completely depends on its cost. Avoid authors who take less than $1.50 per 150 words — you’ll get low-quality texts as a result and neither users nor search engines would appreciate it.

You can find a skillful English author for $2.50-5.

The price for foreign language writing services differs and depends on the country of their residence. For example, a good creative author from India or Turkey costs $1 or $2 per 150 words. At the same time, articles in Danish and Norwegian could be much pricier than in English.

Now time for the ugly truth (breath normally):

• Mind the law of supply and demand — when the author is in demand, they usually raise the price.

• Many of your copywriters will one day stop working with you one day.

• It is impossible to find an author for a long-term cooperation for the same price.

Work with the copywriter

With regard to the wage for the author, I paid for every article after its publishing. In a week of our teamwork, we switched to a postpaid system once a week. It is better to use e-wallets (Webmoney or Yandex) for this purpose because almost everybody has them.

Usually, authors write and publish one article a day. You can write and publish more, topic permitting. Constantly updated website content is a main criterion for search engines. It is better to publish one article a day for several months than to place 60 articles at once and then give up on the content.

Now let’s think of photos for the website — we can’t ignore them, because we are related to travel.

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Part 8. Where to go to get photos and videos for a websitePhotos and videos are tiny moments in the process of your own travel website creation. You should understand either the quality of the materials or their legitimate use.

Why is it so important to place photos and videos on a site? Images allow our eyes to have a rest from reading and perceiving texts. They are easy and friendly. A nice video increases the time users spend on page, which influences the behaviors that search engines measure. Surely, photos and videos should comply with the topic of this article.

Ideally, we recommend writing about the places you’ve been to earlier (thus, publish your own photos).

What if you accidentally have no photos?

There are several solutions:

• Find images in Google and place them on the site. The issue deals with the copyright — photographers can easily require you to remove them or you can even be sued. Think twice before using this method.

• The second way is almost the same except for one difference – you use only allowed for usage images. Just filter the results by choosing Tools and the license type you need (see below).

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• Picture hostings where you can buy any image and not worry about copyrights. The most popular of them are Shutterstock and Depositphotos. There are also free picture hostings on the web but they have copyright requirements.

Same rules work for videos – use your own video, use YouTube clips or buy a unique video for your website.

Process images before putting them on the site

Remember to compress images (reduce file size) before putting them up on the site. This is particularly true for your own pics, when one file could weight many megabytes. Heavy files boot slowly and spoil the impression from the site. The optimal size of the file is 200 Kb. Nobody is getting so up close and personal with your images. That’s why you don’t need a very detailed photo.

And one more thing: In the past, webmasters used to implement keywords in the captions and an alt attribute for every picture. But things have changed. It is now considered over spamming and search engines can decrease your rank in search results. However, you should still fill in ALT + Title. Do it for people – write meaningful descriptions for the images even without keywords.

You can read more about processing photos in the article “How to optimize and automate your work”.

After you’ve churned out the writing and publishing of your articles, it is necessary to install a web-analytics tool on the site, Yandex.Metrica or Google Analytics, to monitor user engagement and behavior.

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Part 9. How to develop and improve the siteWhen you have articles on your site, you should think about further improvement. This stage includes:

• Wait step

• Analytics

• Improvement

See it? We highlighted the “wait step.” The internet is overloaded with information. People create websites literally every minute, so search engines need time to index your site (to add it to the search results). Then, you get your first portions of traffic.

Is your website solving user problems and answering their questions? Good, search engines will rank it higher than other sources.

Your main goal is to see your site in the TOP-10 of search results via the keywords from the semantic core.

Indexation of the articles on the travel site

Your articles can appear in the Yandex or Google’s SERP rather quickly and start attracting users. However, you have to wait for 2 or 3 months after the article has been published to see the targeted, high-quality traffic – leads. How can you speed up the process?

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Use social networks. Create thematic groups to announce new articles and link traffic to the site. Share links via your Facebook or Twitter profiles (SMM is a very big deal, but we won’t deep dive into this topic).

Monitor page views via Google Analytics and Yandex.Metrica. See below on how to add the metric and analytics counters to WordPress.

Improve and update low-performing articles. Add valid information, change elements in design, and increase behavioral factors (for example, add an interesting theme video at the end of the article).

How to connect Google Analytics and Yandex.Metrica

First, you should create accounts in Google Analytics and Yandex Metrica. The process of creating the accounts is described on the web.

You can implement the Google Analytics code via plugin All in One SEO Pack. For Yandex.Metrica, use their own plugin.

Write the code in your template’s files to implement the code without plugins.

What if the traffic is still low?

If you haven’t appeared even in TOP-50 of the search results in three months, you should think about the reasons.

Check the quality of the articles first. If something’s wrong with them (poor texts, slow loading, not interesting, worn-out subject), adjust:

Add interesting facts.

Look at your website’s readability (breakdown by paragraphs, font size, how they look on the mobile devices).

Look at TOP-10 of search result via the same keywords as in the article. What do the competitors are that you haven’t?

Think about the extras that can help sidestep rivals.

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Still no clue as to what’s wrong? Try buying links to your website to grab the search engines’ attention. Target sites that are close to tourism (traveling, rest, sights, etc.).

Please note that buying links doesn’t guarantee the site’s promotion into TOP-10, but it often helps.

Alternative: Look for parallel sites and offer the owners a free link exchange. Young projects could hardly find the webmasters ready to make the equal exchange (one in one), but you should try.

What if the website is okay

Let’s repeat the criteria for success:

1. Completeness: Include no less than 30 pages of useful travel information.

2. Diversification: Include sections with routes, hotels, car rentals and transfer offers, insurance and sightseeing opportunities.

3. Searchability: The website is indexed and properly ranked by Google and other search engines.

4. Profit: The website contains Travelpayouts partner tools and generates income.

If everything is okay and traffic is growing steadily – you’re right on track. Now go on and order a new semantic core (if you used all keywords from the previous one), give new tasks to copywriters and plan further project development.

In the final part of the course, we’ll talk more about earning an income from the travel site.

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Part 10. When to place affiliate links and widgetsNow that you have your articles published, it is tempting to use the affiliate tools on your website. However, there is no need to rush into it. Any external links on the young site can adversely affect their position in SERP.

Yandex and Google don’t mind if you place referrals on your website. However, the automatic algorithm can relate the platform to link dumps (the sites for selling links to other sources) when the 2 or 3-month-old site is full of outbound links.

When should you start earning from the website?

Let’s revise the high-quality site’s criteria:

1. Completeness: Include no less than 30 pages of useful travel information.

2. Diversification: Include sections with routes, hotels, car rentals and transfer offers, insurance and sightseeing opportunities.

3. Searchability: The website is indexed and properly ranked by Google and other search engines.

4. Profit: The website contains Travelpayouts partner tools and generates income.

After that, you can start monetizing your website.

Fortunately, for travel websites, Travelpayouts has a wide array of affiliate tools from links to White Label. Place them on your blog!

Our key recommendation – do everything in moderation with a sense of proportion. Do not flood your site with banners, affiliate links and other advertising. Make sure that the affiliate tools you choose complement your content.

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For example, if you have an article about the route from A to B, placing the search form widget would be smooth. Or, if you talk about a hotel reservations in a certain city, you can implement the link or widget for starting the reservation.

Read more advice on tool implementation inside the articles on the Travelpayouts blog.

What do you do after you’ve filled your articles with the affiliate tools?

When your website is full of interesting thematic articles, you can write the materials that are adapted to the certain tourist offers from the affiliate network, Travelpayouts.

Write articles about transfers, insurance, excursions, etc. Widgets and affiliate links from relevant advertisers are then woven into those articles. Moreover, it is desirable to go on with the site improvements without outages.

How to generate ideas for new content

With the help of Yandex.Metrica or Google Analytics, check out the best-performing keywords. If they could be used for new articles, get to writing!

Find other sites with similar themes and read their content.

Are you a traveler? What would potentially interest you? Write about it, your main goal is to solve the challenges of travelers.

Think about other things and events that fall within a traveler’s mind. It could be anything – insurance, meals, luggage, souvenirs, weather, local specificities and signs, history, tips and recommendations.

Read tourist reviews on forums and other platforms for inspiration.

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Instead of the conclusion

In this guide, we discussed the core moments of website creation. Keep working on the project to earn a profit from it.

Keep writing new articles, analyzing user behavior and SERP and update existing materials.

Certainly, following our recommendations does not guarantee your immediate triumph. Unfortunately, many websites live with low traffic despite a great deal of time and effort invested.

Our firm recommendation in any multi-faceted case is not to give up and move in a chosen direction. The result will be forthcoming. It won’t be instant, but it works out if you never give up.

Here is the website we created while writing this guide: gdealtai.ru.

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