People ask me all the time to research and purchase domain names for them. The research and purchase process is very straightforward and you can easily do this part, yourself. (note: knowing what to do with the domain name to get it working is not so straight forward, though.)
When choosing a domain name, my advice is to use some of your important key phrases in it, keep it as simple as possible, keep it easy to remember.
For instance, my friends named their software business, Party Plan Solutions, as they build software for direct selling party plan businesses. Party Plan Software and Party Plan Solutions are two of their top key phrases. After this and my SEO tune-up of their website, they rank very high for their chosen key phrases…the domain name helps.
To research and purchase domain names go to GoDaddy >>
(I also highly recommend their hosting services)
I’d like to share another great tool; one that I regularly use to help choose my clients’ key phrases. Like all of the tools I use/promote here, it’s free…
If you enter your key phrase, for example, Oregon Coast Vacation Home Rentals, this tool not only suggests other key phrases, it also shows which ones are more popular in Google searches. You can also filter the results in a number of ways if you play around a little with the tool.
So, obviously, if you are trying to decide your top 3 key phrases out of a long list, you can use this tool to choose ones with the highest number of searches, among other factors.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Did you know that you can see if search engines are indexing all of the pages on your website (or any other website)? For my own site I’d enter site:dawnshears.com as the search string. (Just replace the url with any other one…leave out the www)
It will return all of the indexed pages of that site.
If all of your site pages are not being indexed that could be a sign that something is wrong and the ‘bots and spiders are not able to “see” all of your pages. For instance, when I see that only the home page of a site is being indexed, no other pages, it can mean a few things. Perhaps the site is new, sometimes it takes a while for all pages to get indexed. If the site isn’t new it usually means there is a structural problem. Either the site navigation or the site is in Flash or uses frames or another issue. Nine times out of ten it’s issues with Flash or frames. While it’s preferable to build sites (like I do) from the bottom up with search engines in mind, often the site was already in place and it’s not practical to completely redesign it. There are ways to “fix” an existing site to overcome these issues. I’ll address that more in another post.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Wikia: brought to you by the fine folks at Wikipedia
Wikipedia has launched their own search engine, Wikia, today. Although it won’t be a very robust resource for quite some time, Wikia is set up much differently than search giants Google, Yahoo and MSN. Just like Wikipedia, volunteer collaborators will rank and recommend websites and also exclude anything that looks “spammy,” or deceitful. In this way the collaborators become an active part of the Wikia ranking algorhythm. The founder, Jimmy Wales, anticipates that Wikia will return more valid, better quality, search results than other large engines.
This is a pretty interesting concept. It makes me think of the DMOZ (Open Directory Project) search directories (Alta Vista was powered by the DMOZ) that use people, not spiders or ‘bots, to categorize and rank material. I just know it took a long time to get sites accepted and indexed. By default, ranking systems like these favor sites that have longevity.
Will this change the way I do search engine optimization, going forward? Not really. I’ll keep an eye on Wikia and be sure to take that engine into consideration. Perhaps, I will start submitting sites to Wikia for consideration to test drive it. The same good search engine optimization practices I’ve been using should put all sites in good stead with any legitimate search system. Using only “best practices” with no deceptive or spammy tricks seems to work well across the board.
As Wikia matures, it will be interesting to see how successfully a seach engine can index and rank sites using a system similar to Wikipedia.
PC world article >>
Filed under: SEO
Sometimes even I am amazed at the fantastic results I am able to get using best-practices for good search engine rankings.
Currently, I am ranking very high on the 1st page of the SERPs (search engine results pages) for the following key phrases:
A BIG victory, considering some of my competition!
