Monthly Archives: July 2009

The Truth About Keywords in Domain Names

Posted on July 26, 2009 by

Author : Mollie Holman

A question that comes up often is whether a company should be using a keyword rich domain name or not. While it may be a bit easier to get rankings with keywords in your domain, it might not always be the best choice. Before you make this crucial decision, ensure you know the benefits of each choice.

Building Brand vs Building Rankings

Before you purchase your domain name, you need to make the decision of what’s more important – brand awareness or search engine rankings. It’s not that you won’t get search engine rankings if you choose brand awareness, it’s just that it might take longer to get those rankings.

If you have a short, marketable company name, you likely want that company name well known in your niche. This doesn’t happen overnight – it takes many years of promoting your company name everywhere that you promote your website. The rewards are priceless though. Imagine having people automatically mention your company anytime they discuss your niche.

If you have a longer company name or one that is less marketable, your brand awareness may not be as important. For such a company, you would be very happy just to be getting search engine rankings and traffic. Brand recognition may be more of a secondary goal to you.

The Search Engine Optimization Benefits of Keyword Rich Domains

Some people are under the impression that if you use a keyword rich domain name, you will automatically get rankings for that keyword phrase. While this may be true in an uncompetitive niche, it usually isn’t the case. Having keywords in your domain name just gives a small rankings boost.

It is debatable whether search engines automatically give rankings boosts for domain keywords or whether the rankings boost is an indirect result. I am more inclined to believe that it is an indirect result. When you have good keywords in your domain name, a large percentage of your links would have your keywords in the link anchor text. Normally some of your links would go to less desirable anchor text such as your company name or url. Those links only give boosts for specific keywords if you have keywords in your domain. Think of all the links that require you to use your company or website name, .web directories, industry publications, press releases, etc.

Although this boost may be a small one, you should be taking every bit of help you can in the battle to get rankings. On top of the rankings help, domain keyword usage also gets your domain name bolded in the search results. This can draw more attention and improve your click through rates.

The Downside of Keyword Filled Domains

There are cases where it is less advantageous to have keywords in your domain name.

In certain niches, this could make your url blend in with other competitors with similar urls. If your domain looks the same as another well ranked site, people may think they have already visited your site. You need to stand out.

With some keywords, it can look quite spammy to use them all in your domain name. Your url might look too long or the keywords might not apply to all of your offerings. This could severely limit your click through rates and conversion rates.

By using your keywords in your domain name, you may be making it extremely tough to develop brand recognition. Instead of always seeing your company name everywhere, people might instead just be seeing your keywords.

Conclusion

There is no right or wrong answer about what kind of domain name is better. It just depends on your goals and the details of your circumstances. You can get search engine rankings with virtually any domain name, but what domain is going to help your company the most?

Jeremy Biberdorf is an internet marketing professional with over 10 years of experience. Check out his website for low priced keyword research services. If you’d rather handle keyword research yourself, check out these free keyword tools and this keyword search software. Check out more on The Truth About Keywords in Domain Names Continue reading →

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The Importance of Keywords to your SEO Campaign

Posted on July 26, 2009 by

Author : Mollie Holman

If you are working on an SEO campaign you will know the aim is to rank at the top of the search engines for your chosen keywords. However have you considered the importance of the keywords you select? If not this article will give you some insight into what you should be thinking of.

What are Keywords?

Firstly let’s consider what keywords are. Put simply they are the words or phrases that people put into a search engine when they search. The results that they get back are the ones the search engine believes are the most relevant to the chosen word or phrase.

Checking Number of Searches

When you are choosing your keywords one of the most important thing to know is how many searches there are for a keyword. There are a lot of useful tools, many of which are free that you can find on the internet that will help you with this. It is absolutely vital that you know this because what is the point in appearing at the top of the search engines for a phrase that no one searches for. So once you have an idea of the keywords you want to use you can find out how many searches there are for each of them to help you reduce your list and only include those with a large number of searches.

Checking the competition

Once you know how many searches there are for your keywords you also need to know how many results there are for each one. If you have a keyword that has a medium number of searches but a very high competition level it might have less value than those keywords that have less competition. It is really important to check this as words with very high competition as much harder to get to the top for and will take a lot longer so the search volume needs to be high enough to warrant the effort.

Commercial Intent of Keywords

One of the other things you need to analyse is the commercial intent of each of the keywords. If you are looking to sell to customers then you need to make sure that you are targeting buyers. There are a lot of keywords out there that people use just to find information on a certain topic and not for buying. Those are the ones you should be avoiding. One way to tell is to look at the top 10 results in a search engine if there is only one commercial site and the rest are information then it is not a commercial keyword. However if there are 9 commercial sites in the top 10 then your chances will be a lot better there.

Long Tail Keywords

These are basically search terms that include 3 or more words. These are phrases you should look at very closely as they are usually the ones used by people looking to buy. In addition to that the more general keywords are usually dominated by the big brands and will be a lot harder to break into.

As you can see from the above selecting the keywords to optimise your website for is not a simple thing. It is important to do the proper research to ensure you are going in the right direction. Without this research you could waste a lot of time and money on SEO with very little effect.

If you have found this article useful then you can get more information from Dazines – website optimisation.

Dazines – web development, web design SEO Company London UK
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Getting Second Tier Links

Posted on July 26, 2009 by

Author : Mollie Holman

If you are embarking on an SEO campaign you will know that it is important to get links to your website. This article will look at quality links and ways in which you can get them.

Authority Sites

You are probably aware that the best type of links you can get are those from authority sites. These are sites that have a high PageRank and a lot of links to them. Usually they are information sites that help people in your industry. Obtaining a link from these sites is like gold and will really help your rankings. However the biggest problem is that links from these sites are notoriously difficult to get and so you may be disappointed. You should always make sure you ask the webmasters of these sites to link to you but if they say no you need to adapt your strategy.

Second Tier Sites

If you do have difficulty getting links from authority sites then you can change tactics. The best thing to do is look at all the sites that the authority site links to. You will then need to check each of them out and contact them in order to request them to link to you.

This can be a really successful strategy as you will get some influence from the authority site if you get links from the sites it links to. Obviously these links will not have the same value as those from the authority sites but they will still be important and so should not be ignored.

Link Value

All links have different value and the in some ways a good way to tell is by checking the PageRank of a site that you are requesting a link from. The higher the PageRank the more important the link is. This seems strange because surely a link is a link but this is not the case.

When Google counts your links it also gives an importance to your links and the more important links you have the higher you will appear in the search results.

Anchor Text

Obviously when you are requesting links from both authority and second tier sites it is important to request anchor text that includes your keywords. This is absolutely vital to appearing at the top of the search engines for your chosen keywords. The more links you have that contain your keywords the more chance you have of appearing high up. In addition to that if your anchor text is used on authority or second tier sites that are relevant to you it will have even more importance and really help your campaign.

Conclusion

Many people will request links from authority sites and if they get rejected they will just move on and try something else. If you adopt the strategy discussed in this article you will not just be losing an authority site that said no. It is always important with any SEO campaign that you are flexible and able to adapt as things change if you do this then your chance of being successful is far greater. You could be surprised that if you get a lot of links from second tier sites that your ranking will increase far more quickly than you would have expected and this can only benefit your site and your business in the long run.

If you have found this article useful then you can get more information from Dazines – search engine optimisation.

Dazines – web development, web design SEO Company London UK
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Top Ways to Tell if your Website Has Problems

Posted on July 26, 2009 by

Author : Mollie Holman

If you have a website then you want to make sure you are getting the most out of it. However there are a lot of sites out there that are simply not getting it right. The aim of this article is to highlight some major points that you should consider for your website.

1. No Website Traffic

Many companies will invest in a great looking website that does everything that they want it to do. However it is important to think about how people will find you. It is not the case that you simply create a website and the visitor will come. You need to think about ways to create a profile for your website so that people will come. Initially this should be done through a combination of both paid advertising and search engine optimisation. By following the right techniques you will quickly find that people come to your website which gives you the chance of converting.

2. Poor Content

It is not always easy to tell if your content is poor or not. However one thing you can do is to look at the content on your competitors’ websites. Does yours stand out, do you have anything that sets you apart. If the answer to that is no then you should probably think about rewriting. The more you can do to draw people into your website the better.

3. No Call to Action

If you have a website it is important to create a call to action. The idea is that you want people to either buy from you or contact you. If you don’t ask for it then your chances are decreased. If you have done any sales at all then you will know you nearly always have to ask for the sale, whether that be telesales of face to face selling. The internet is not different you have to ask for the sale. If you have no call to action on your website then you should change that as soon as possible.

4. Irrelevant Traffic

One way of telling if you are getting a lot of irrelevant traffic is if you have a lot of people coming to your website but no one is buying. For example for your website we did a trial on StumbleUpon and got a huge spike in traffic however we got no more conversions on our website. The reason for this was we were bringing in lots of people but not people looking to buy. So basically all of the traffic was pointless and a waste of our time. You always need to consider the value of the traffic coming to your website and if it has not value then you need to change your tactics.

5. Failure to make Conversions

If you have a lot of relevant traffic coming to your sites from search engines of directories but are not making sales then you need to consider the problem. It is likely that you site is either not easy to navigate or it is difficult to find what they want. The other alternative is that your site does not appear professional or you are not giving people what they want. If this is the case you need to take action immediately and get things changed.

The above are just some ideas of where you might have problems but you need to consider your situation and your industry to find out exactly what is going wrong.

If you have found this article useful then you can get more information from Dazines – website optimisation.

Dazines – web development, web design SEO Company London UK
Check out more on Top Ways to Tell if your Website Has Problems Continue reading →

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Choosing the Right Web Host for Your Site

Posted on July 26, 2009 by

Author : Mollie Holman

The web hosting industry is incredibly competitive today, and they know that users are becoming increasingly sophisticated, so they have no choice but to provide their clients with better and better service, or else risk losing them to any one of the waiting pack of others. We are going to discuss some of most important features below, and explain briefly why they should be major factors in making your decision.

1)Type of website to be hosted

If it is personal and just for fun, there are many free hosting options available for you, with a few small catches. You will most likely have to display some banner advertising on your page in exchange for this service. If your site is business-related, then you should by all means find a good commercial host. You should also have your own domain name and IP address. Free accounts are not for anyone even half serious about doing business on the web.

2)Affordable Price

The cost of web hosting ranges anywhere from totally free to thousands of dollars a month for a dedicated server, depending on the features you need and the options available on the particular package you choose, check if there is a requirement to sign up for a minimum period; and if your package is scalable, meaning that upgrades will not be a problem or burden for you when the time comes.

3)Choosing the Platform: Linux or Microsoft Exchange

The choice depends on what kind of website you have and what you need to be served, if you’re putting up a basic site with standard HTML, without any server side scripting or database support. For most people just starting out, a Linux server is fine; but if you plan to use databases or ASP on your site, then you should go with Microsoft Exchange.

4)Space and traffic requirements

Space and traffic are often the basis for many web hosts rates, whether or not this has any basis in reality. I say this because the majority of sites require only a few megabytes (MBs) of space and the amount of traffic they will receive is rarely an issue.

5)Bundled email accounts

This is an often underrated feature of web hosting packages, since emails are essentially the lifeblood of an online business. Be sure that your package contains enough emails and aliases for your business, preferably an unlimited number of both. Be careful from the start and choose a package that meets your needs.

6)24/7 customer support

Many Web Hosts offer both email and phone support while others are available only via email. A competent host should offer 24/7 toll-free technical support provided by experienced, professionally trained technicians.

7)Maximum Up-time

Many companies will say they’re up 99.9% of the time when the reality may be quite different. Look into this as much as possible and again, check with as many references as possible to find out their experiences.

In the end, choosing the right Web Host really depends on your individual needs. Subsequently, what may constitute the perfect Web Host for one person may not meet the needs of another. It is up to you to decide, through a combination of logic, research skills, and a dash of intuition.

Author is the CEO of ITboons, more information on this topic is available at Microsoft Exchange Hosting and if you need further information regarding how to choose a hosting provider please visit the website Custom Application Hosting More on Choosing the Right Web Host for Your Site Continue reading →

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