If you are still in the planning stages of your website and you haven’t even got your domain name in the bag yet, now is the time to make sure you pick one that won’t embarrass you at a later date.
We all know that all the good ones have gone – allegedly – but it’s still important to make sure that the one you do finally decide on is easy to read, easy to understand and doesn’t need to be spelt out when you say it out loud to someone.
Here are a few good ways to see whether you have chosen the right domain name:
• Write it down – complete with the http:// bit – on a piece of paper. This sounds a bit mad but if you can see what your domain name looks like written down you’ll get an idea of whether it will work or not
• Tell a few other trusted people what domain name you are thinking of using. If you get comments like ‘Huh?’ or ‘Say that again?’ or ‘Can you spell that?’ then it might be worth having a rethink
• Try it with and without hyphens if you have more than one word in your suggested URL. Hyphens can be a pain but a longer URL can look totally confusing without them
In the end it’s just as much a matter of personal taste as it is anything else. You will have to live with your choice so make sure it’s a good one. You also need to ensure you think about keywords – don’t go for an obscure title that won’t help you in the search engines just because it sounds good. Put traffic flow first – you won’t get many visitors without it.
Ok? So go and choose a great domain name – and then grab it before someone else does.
The Google tilde operator (~) helps you uncover synonyms. This can be very useful to your SEO efforts when deciding on your targeted keywords.
The tilde operator requires that you use the ~ at the end of your Google search so that Google will bold face any synonyms in the results. This can help you with your latent semantic indexing (LSI) efforts.
Latent semantic indexing looks at related words and helps with the indexing of relevant websites. The theory is complex but in essence, the more words that show Google your site is relevant to your subject matter, the better chances you have of getting indexing for targeted keywords in your niche.
Some SEO experts pay great attention to LSI and some do not. It does stand to reason that you should at least consider it in your website optimization efforts along with other approaches such as Long Tail keywords.
When deciding to write articles or site content, look up synonyms in your niche and sprinkle those keywords throughout your text. This way, when the search engine spiders crawl your site, they’ll see relevancy in your pages and consider you to be an authority on your subject matter. This can get your more rankings for keywords as well as more traffic when people go looking for information on a particular subject.
You might not be aware of how powerful your signature in community forums can be for SEO, networking and promotion. Not only might they entice someone to visit your website if they click, but they’ll entice search engines as well.
When you sign up for membership to community forums, you generally have a specific amount of signature space that you can add to each forum posting. Some sites will have rules and regulations about number of links as well as how many posts you need to have before you’re allowed to utilise this feature. The great thing is that for every post you make, your signature attaches and forum posts do get indexed by search engines.
Keyword anchoring can definitely help the SEO for your website or blog. For instance, if you sell computer parts, you might choose to link that word to your site in your signature. Not only will you get visits from interested people who find your posts interesting or who happen to need computer parts but if you get a high number of posts on that forum, each post with your signature link in it contributes to your site’s page rank and your search engine placement for keywords. Don’t write anything misleading in the signature but trying to write an eye-catching signature can help you get clicks.
Some who are looking for the forum signature merely to entice visitors would suggest changing your signature often but others would say that this isn’t as wise from an SEO standpoint because you could lose rankings for your old search terms as the forum may change the posts in archives to represent your new signature.
Whatever you choose to do, it’s worthwhile to know that networking and promoting yourself in community forums online can work for you in multiple ways.
Whenever you visit any website about internet marketing, the one thing you are bound to read about is links. The more of them you can create between your own site and other related ones the better.But if you do this you might well be neglecting one area that it’s vital you get a good result in, and that’s building links within your website.
This is important because it makes it easier for the search engine spiders to find their way around your website. It’s your way of saying, ‘Hey look! My site has twenty pages (or however many it has) and here they all are!’ If you don’t give this message out by connecting all your pages together internally, there is a real chance that the spiders won’t see all your pages and only catalog those pages it finds.
Now this might not seem like a big deal, but think about it in more depth for a moment. Let’s say you have created a really excellent page on some aspect of internet marketing (assuming that’s the subject of your website) and you have filled it with properly researched and keyword information, as well as offering Google ads and other adverts for referral schemes and affiliated programs that you have a personal interest in.
If you don’t make it easy for the search engine spiders can’t find that page when they crawl your site, because you haven’t provided links to it from other pages, then there is a real possibility that the page won’t show up in search results whenever anyone looks up anything to do with internet marketing.
That’s how important internal link building is when you create new pages or develop the internal structure of your website. So make it a priority to get those links in place and watch the results.
Sean Rasmussen
Internet Marketing Blog
WealthCreationAffiliate.com © 2007 - 2008
This can be something of an obsession with internet marketers of all shapes and sizes. It’s easy to understand why, because the search engine ranking of your site will strongly influence how well you do in the results whenever someone looks up a keyword or phrase which links to your website.While it is important to keep an eye on it to see how well your site is performing, it shouldn’t turn into something you end up checking twice a day every day. Your search engine ranking changes over time (hopefully for the better) and it does so as a result of what you do to change and develop your site – not as a result of you watching it like you would watch a plant that is starting to grow.
It’s good to develop routines when you start any new internet business, as routines help you to develop good habits and ensure that nothing important gets missed as part of your day to day progress. You can check various parts of your business and see how they are doing, and where some extra effort is required you can then look into how best to do that.
As you develop your business and learn more about keywords and how to make sure that people (and the robots and spiders that Google, Yahoo and others use) find your site, you should find that your website naturally starts to perform better. It takes time for any website to start figuring in the search engine rankings at all, let alone to perform well. No website gets to the coveted number one spot overnight, so be sure you don’t ask for too much when it comes to monitoring the progress of your site.
They say the best things in life are worth waiting for, and I think a higher search engine ranking definitely falls into that category.
Sean Rasmussen
Internet Marketing Blog
WealthCreationAffiliate.com © 2007 - 2008
If your website is the cart, keyword research is the horse. In other words, don’t put the website before the keyword research.
If you’re thinking about setting up a new site on a new subject, research should be your number one keyword before you do anything else. You need to keep a lid on the excitement of starting something new and realise that the stages that occur before your website goes live are just as important – if not more so – than the stages which come afterwards.
Find a good keyword selector tool and use it to figure out which keywords should get you good results on Google and other search engines. If you do this in the early stages of creating your new website – ideally before the design process starts, and especially before you pick your new domain name – you’ll be able to use the results you get to create a much stronger website from the word go.
But is it any good continuing with keyword research after you’re up and running?
In truth I believe keyword research always has a place in any strong internet marketing business. It’s a good way to check your progress and see whether you’re missing out on using any currently popular keywords that are being searched for. You wouldn’t want to be changing your domain name on a regular basis, but the articles and content you use will forever be refreshing themselves. Older material can be archived and the keywords will still remain in use, but new material should reflect the most popular search terms being used at that time.
Keyword research is the backbone of any good website and even though it can sometimes feel like you’re skiving if you kick back with a coffee and surf a few sites, it can actually be a profitable activity.
Keyword research is the key…
Sean Rasmussen
Internet Marketing Blog
WealthCreationAffiliate.com © 2007
