Search Engine Optimization Tips Blog

In the previous post, we saw that the domain names that we select should be keyword rich to enhance the power of our domains in terms of SEO. This is only one of the aspects of selecting a domain name. There are other factors that need to be taken into consideration to leverage the maximum benefit from our domain name. Here are few industry’s best practices in finalizing our domain names.

First of all, try to avoid abbreviations in your domain names unless it is a keyword in itself. For the convenience of the users, shorter and meaningful domain names are easily remembered. That is one of the advantages of choosing a keyword rich domain name. The domain name will be linked with the service or the product that you offer and hence it can be easily remembered. If your domain name is too long, there are chances that your website’s visitors make mistakes while typing the long domain name and you will lose a certain portion of your website’s visitors owing to typographical errors. This would be one of the silliest ways of losing your visitors but still it would hurt your conversion rates. So always try to keep your domain name as short as possible.

At onetime hyphenation was used in domain names to separate words. Today it is not necessary. Search engines have become really intelligent to recognize whole words in the given string. People will find it difficult to remember the hyphens in the URL. So to make it easy for them, strip your website URL of all hyphenations. You must also keep in mind that it can be easily pronounced. There are number of situations whereby you will be giving your website address to your customers over the phone verbally so the domain names should be easily understandable. Always use correct spellings in the domain name and this will increase the chances of getting the right domain name the first time when you mention it. If you are not clear in this regard, you would be sending your potential customers to your competitor’s website.

Another important tip to note, which is often not taken into consideration, is the domain names starting alphabets. We have seen a number of directories that list the websites alphabetically so if you can help try to use higher alphabets as the starting letters. Only webmasters who are very meticulous about building a perfectly SEO friendly website that takes into consideration all the aspects of driving traffic to their website pay attention to minor details like these.

What used to be one of the best practices sometime ago is now no more the best practice and that is using the plural forms in the domain name. It is advisable to use the plural form of the words as long as it does not make your domain name sound awkward. For example when people want to reserve a table in a hotel in New York will be using the keywords, “hotels New York” when they don’t know the hotel name or they will use the singular form only when they know the name of the hotel in which they like to reserve a table. When they are making general searches for hotels, they will use the plural form so it is best to use words in their plural form in your domain name.

The next aspect that comes after deciding your niche market is the selection of your domain name. This can be one of the most challenging phases. If you have selected a niche that is highly popular then already there will be thousands of websites along those lines offering the same services or selling the same products. Getting a good domain name will be difficult. All the good domain names would have already taken. Today all possible single word domain names are already taken in all the niche markets. It has become a lucrative business to register domain names that have great future potential even though it has nothing to do with their core business. They sell such domain names at a premium fee. Since this itself has become a niche business of its own, it has become really impossible to get single word domain names.

Moreover, for SEO reasons more and more companies are moving away from registering their domain names based on the name of their company. Now the trend is to look for keyword rich domain names. You will have added advantage when you manage to get your main keyword in your domain name. So spend enough time in brainstorming your keywords and identify a powerful keyword for your business that can be registered as your domain name.

Once you find a good domain name for your business make sure to register it immediately as you can lose the domain name if you fail to register it immediately especially if your have come up with an attractive domain name which has great keyword strength, you must not take chances.

If your services are limited to a particular geographic area, you will be able to enhance the power of your domain name by adding the place name along with your domain name. This is one of the phases that should not be rushed, as this will define your online face. However you must make sure that the domain name that you select is also professional sounding domain name. You should not compromise professionalism for the want of a keyword rich domain name. Your website visitors should feel comfortable in your website and one of the factors that makes your website visitors feel comfortable is your domain name. Therefore, pay attention to this information so that you can tap the maximum potential of your website. SEO is no more just an isolated set of online promotional strategies. It has to take into consideration online user psychology, user patterns, geographic peculiarities, etc. Only on that count you will be able to come up with a sound SEO strategy that is hard to crack by your competitors. If you involve an experienced SEO company they will act as your consultant who can advise you on the above aspects. So it is not necessary that you will have to learn everything by yourself and perform the optimization. You can take advantage of the experience of the experts in the industry.

There are so many ways you can add links to your site! Making sure you take advantage of as many as possible is imperative. Here are just a few; we can expand to more later. The trick to really raking in the links is to be a social animal, with an eye to being helpful - cultivate a rep as a cool guy or gal, and you can see everyone starting to listen when you give advice and being willing to link to you or follow links back to your site.

Article Marketing

Article marketing done right can be a powerful tool! High quality, helpful content with the promise of more back home will encourage people to follow your link, and your link provides juice for your site. It’s win, win.

Squidoo

Make Squidoo lenses, link them to each other and back to your website. A well done, ranking Squidoo lens can bring you lovely traffic and good link juice.

Reddit

Many find that linking from Reddit can instantly boost traffic. The trick is to stay relevant and on topic - don’t spam this or any of the other social bookmarking and networking sites!

Yahoo Answers

Any type of questions and answers site is a great place to become active on. If you can establish yourself as someone who knows their stuff, people will start checking out your site, and link juice can exponentially increase!

Linkbait

Linkbait is still very effective for garnering one way links - have a cool widget, gadget or news story? Even a funny video? Pull people in and make it easy for them to add the link to their site. A box with a cut and paste link in it can encourage even the most computer challenged to try linking to you!

Blogs and Forums

TREAD CAREFULLY! You can get booted for spam if you are not super careful! Make sure you only say something when you can truly contribute. Most blogmasters and forum moderators don’t mind a helpful link if you don’t abuse it and you add value to their venue.

There are a lot of things you can do to increase linking if you have time, or can convince someone else to take up the cause for you. Promoting your business can benefit from the personal touch! Tomorrow we’ll delve more deeply into the concept of social participation to encourage links and traffic.

Dynamic and Static URLs

A dynamic URL is most often used on a PHP or Javascript based site. It calls database content to fill a page template. This kind of URL relies on the database and variable strings in order to form a complete URL. You will often see these on blogs, forums and e-commerce sites, and they will usually look something like this:
http://www.yourdomain.com/category/thread.php?threadid=12345&sort=dae

A static URL doesn’t rely on variable strings. This allows it to stay stable throughout the site; they will normally look more like this:
http://www.yourdomain.com/category/this-is-a-filename.html

The dynamic URL used as an example here is actually much shorter than many you will see. An overwhelming majority of the dynamic links that you will find online, especially in e-commerce stores, can have over eight question marks, thirty ampersands and a unbelievable amount of unidentifiable numbers.

You Must Optimize your URLs!

Dynamic URL’s are often indexed at a much slower pace than static URLs, and users follow suit. When viewing your page in a search engine, a user is more likely to click a link that has a recognizable URL string. This is ten times more likely to be a static URL such as one with the title of an article in the URL than one with question mark followed by a string of nonsense marks and numbers.

Search engines don’t like missing keywords, and they also identify session tags and variables as “stop signs” indicating something that could likely be ignored with no adverse effects. This could seriously damage your indexed page count. Static URLs are quite easy to optimize, and should be kept consistent with your title tags and your site as a whole for best results.

Try not to have more than 3 subdirectories in any URL. Use keywords in your URLs if you can. The best place for a keyword is in a subdirectory (such as the category or topic). If you want your page to be indexed by search engines, avoid session tags and variables to reassure the search engine spiders that they are indexing properly!

Following these tips combined with the information about title tags posted previously will greatly improve the speed and completeness with which the search engines index your site!

In the previous post, we saw that the website optimization for a website should start much before the website is designed. We noted that the process should start along with the business planning.

If you are interested to start an online home based business to generate some secondary source of income, you will be required to launch a website. At this stage, you are likely to have a question in mind, “How is selecting the niche market for one’s business related to SEO?” When it comes to SEO we are interested in dealing with online competition effectively and to increase one’s online visibility. In this broader sense, selecting the right niche market too is part of SEO. When we start discussing this, further you will see a further stronger relationship between the two.

When you are selecting the niche for your business, you must select something that receives lot of search queries in the search engines and at the same time, the number of website in that niche should be relatively lesser when compared to other equally popular niches. You can find the first aspect of keyword popularity from Google Keyword Tool that you will find at: adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. This tool is basically for those who want to launch Adwords campaign but it will still serve our purpose when we are brainstorming for ideas. Another place that we can consider to find the latest search trends is - google.com/trends. You just need to explore the above two pages to get more insights on the topic. You will be able to find the second aspect that is the number of websites online for a particular keyword or phrase which can also be known as keyword competition from the regular search page when you make a search in any of the search engines, you will get the total number of sites that are considered relevant for the search that is made. This number should be less where as the former value should be more.

Secondly, you must select a niche market that is not seasonal because seasonal niches will receive searches only during those seasons. For instance if you are selling products or offering services relating to Christmas, then you will receive traffic only during those seasons. For almost 8 to 9 months, your website’s traffic will be very low. In other words, you will make very little money during other months. So select something that will get you traffic round the year.

The next important point to remember is choosing a niche whose market has great future scope. A classic example here would be niches there were based on Y2K compliance. These businesses did not have any scope after the year 2000. So this is a short-lived market. Only up to a specified time, you will get traffic and after that event, you will be forced to look for a new niche.

As you can see selection of the right niche is closely connected your website’s traffic and hence the success of your business.

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