We begin by planning the general layout of our first neighborhood. Each website is like a building in the neighborhood, with links like streets (most of them one-way) and our databases forming an underground infrastructure that supplies one or more of the sites with services.

Since this is to be a self-supporting neighborhood, we need one main industry — a factory building, located at one edge of the neighborhood. The factory site will be our biggest and ‘best’ site. It will provide information on dinosaur species, so let us say one page for each species, plus pages on each genus, along with various support pages, indexes, sub-topics and such.

The factory site is our showcase — the kind of site people will want to link to, just for the valuable information it provides. This site will require the most work, but since we chose a topic we are interested in, even passionate about, it should not be too onerous a task to research and write about all those dinosaur species. Remember, our sites will be designed with modules, so they can be easily managed and expanded. So we will make a list of 100 or more species of dinosaurs, and so soon as we have the first dozen or so pages, we put the site on-line.

Our neighborhood will need its own gather-place, a town-hall site, but let’s put off building that until we begin to get some traffic. We know it is coming, however, so we will leave space in the factory site for a notice (ad) about that site. The meeting place will be a forum for dinosaur related discussions.

Of course the neighborhood needs several houses for the workers to live in. These are the sub-sub-topic specific sites. One might be about the Tyrannosaurus Rex called Sue that was found in the Dakota hills and was the subject of some controversy. Another will be about ‘pregnant’ dinosaurs (of which something like three have been identified so far) — and how the bones reveal their maternal state. Another about dinosaur eggs, and another about dinosaur tracks, several about specific dinosaur excavation sites, etc., etc.

House sites are relatively small, maybe a dozen pages each. They zero in on a topic though, and provide intense coverage of that specific subject. Since they are related to the general topic, they all provide valuable incoming links to the factory site. The factory does not link back to the houses, which are spread over as many different servers (and IP addresses) as possible. If, for example, a house site describes a location where a herd of pachyrhinosaurs died trying to cross a river, there would be links back to the pachyrhinosaur page on your factory site, as well more general links to the factory home-page.

We will need some garages and sheds, maybe a barn or two in the neighborhood, just to hold junk. These are sites made up of reprint articles, public domain material, etc. They are fast-build sites, with as much text as possible, spread out over lots of pages. Find an old book on dinosaurs and divide it up so each page has four to ten kilobytes of text related to a single subject. Copy reports off government sites that relate to Dinosaur National Monument or other locations with dino-related keywords in them. Several of these sites will blogs, you can even host some of them on free-hosting sites, just for the SEO benefit of links from a high-authority site.

Each of these junkier sites will link to the factory, and each may link to several house sites as well. People searching for outdated dinosaur terms will find them in your old-book site, and go from there to one of the other sites in your Empire. Or people searching for information on Dinosaur National Monument will find your governmental-reprint information, and likewise end up going to your other sites.

It is a good idea to have one more blog site, this one your personal public-relations site (personal branding), where you establish yourself as an expert in dinosaurs. Your interest may be an amateur one, but many amateurs have high levels of expertise in their areas of interest, even if they are not employed in the field or do not have academic credentials. Post frequently about current news items about dinosaurs, interesting facts you uncover during your research, etc.

As you research all these other sites, keep your eyes open for a subject that might make a good link-bait site. Two or three link-bait sites would do the neighborhood a lot of good, if you can come up with that many effective ploys. If you don’t know what link-bait is, see the Wiki article on linking, it has a few paragraphs describing this.

If you create your own dino-related product, you will need a sales site as well. You can use a sales-site for funneling affiliate traffic too. A typical sales site has no outgoing links other than the purchase link. You can have multiple sales-pages on one site, each in its own subdirectory or sub-domain, but don’t link between these, however tempting it might seem. Once on your sales page you want your customer to click on the purchase link — don’t distract them with any other options.

The local newspaper site is another optional, but useful site to have in the neighborhood. This site just posts RSS feeds relevant to dinosaurs. This would not be a very busy news-room, but there is a constant trickle of new findings about dinosaurs that your target audience is likely to be interested in. Alternatively, you might want to include this as a side-bar on your factory site (for a busier news subject you can make this a separate site).

Our next post will discuss our plan for making money from each of these sites, which will affect the layout specifics that will be the subject of our last post on this topic.