SEO Strategies For New Domains

Ranking for 3 and 4 word phrases is still easy – look for the popular ones by using Google’s Adwords Suggestion Tool.

The order of the words in the phrase is very important. You shouldn’t scramble this around to find a domain name, it needs to be exact. Once you’ve searched 25 of these phrases and finally found an available .com domain name, register it on a 5 year registration.

If you want to make your life easy you’ll have your web host install a free copy of wordpress for you to manage your freshly created site. The free SEO plugins for wordpress are easy to find and free. If you’re lucky you control panel may have a one click installation button.

The meta-title of your site’s index page should be the same 3 words in the same order as your domain.

• The first 3 words that should appear on this page are – you guessed it – the 3 words of phrase you registered for your domain. Typically this will be a bold H1 title of your page within the body of your site (different from meta-title).
• Next, include an image of some sort under the index page title. This image should be named yourkeywordphrase.jpg (obviously you replace that with your keyword phase), you should use alt text=”your keyword phrase” for the image as well.
• Mention the keyword phrase in the page’s body text 3 or 4 times throughout the page. Separate from this, scatter the words from your keyword phrase throughout your page’s content in a very natural manner. Let your keywords choose your pages content direction and just naturally focus on the things that are important to getting the right type of visitors to your site.
• Don’t generically insert keywords and write horrible content to achieve certain density goals. Do try to keep checking and revising your content to make sure your keywords hit 2-4% density. Use a free keyword density checker to make sure you’re right. Free Firefox addons like SEOQuake have this tool included.

With all the information above taken into consideration, the real key to unlocking SEO is to just be yourself and write your own content. Whatever is coming to mind put it down. Over time your mind will be more SEO focused and your content will naturally rank better. You’ll start doing keyword research before you choose your blog post titles and new page titles. Many things will snap into gear the first day you really investigate search optimization for a few hours.

Overall the most important thing to remember is that Google and other search engines are improving everyday. This means that eventually the best content will be ranked higher, so just focus on effective writing and providing good information.

The best advice I’ve ever heard in my SEO career was from Shoemoney (said randomly in one of his youtube videos) went something like “SEO is making Google look smart for ranking your site first”. Always think about your site from Google’s prospective.

Look at the first page results and see what you will have to do to genuinely make your page better than theirs. SEO is not magic, it’s just not being completely ignorant of the simple concepts that determine where your pages rank.

It’s very important to spend time researching the keyword phrase you decide to register for your domain name , etc. It’s critical that you are registering a phrase that receives enough search volume to warrant the work to build the site and get 15% of the searchers clicking thru to your site from the result page.

As your site gains reputation by receiving more links from other sites, social profiles, etc you will naturally start ranking for the 2 word phrase possibles inside your target group of words. For example “BostonEmergencyPlumber.com” might start to rank for “Boston Plumber” and “Emergency Plumber” if it was able to gain enough reputation. Think about sub phrases within your 3 word phrase and try to find optimal combination.

Using these strategies will help a legitimate website get much higher rankings in Google. If you are attempting to build spam sites or sites about topics you really don’t care about or have knowledge of, this information won’t help you.

Google Serving Personalized Results For Everyone

Christoph Cemper gives a great overview of Google’s Decision to provide personalized results for all searches. Should SEOs be worried?

Learn why Google Analytics is now illegal in Germany. Find out how many of the world’s websites now use Google Analytics and get up to date on Google’s new DNS services.

Christoph says don’t freak out, but should you?

Does Domain Registration Length Affect Search Rankings?

Domain registration length does seem to be a small factor when Google is trying to make up it’s mind where to rank your site in search results.

I’ve spent time reading snips of blogs, watching YouTube videos, and the only thing I can really determine is your might as well register the domain for 5 years and use a public registration. When you register a domain for a single year you generally renew the thing anyway.

It makes sense to me that Google might trust a domain a small bit more if it’s on a 5 year registration. Typically spammers will register a domain and burn it out (get blocked by blacklists, etc) within a few months, of course they use 1 year registrations…maybe not for long.

Contact me or drop a comment below if you have some hard facts on this, or can point me in a clearer direction.

Google PageRank Update

For the first time since June, Google has updated it’s public page rank utility.

What is PageRank?

PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page.

In other words, the more sites linking to you, the more page rank you accumulate. The amount you accumulate is completely based on the PageRank of the sites linking to you.

What’s my website’s PR?

You can easily check your PageRank at many free sites such as PRchecker.info

Google Caffeine Search Preview

Google Caffeine is born. Several Google engineers have been hard at work the past several months developing what may become Google’s next generation indexing/search platform, code named Caffeine. Google has touted the insane indexing speeds and accuracy of the new platform in recent press releases and several in-depth reviews are starting to show up around the web.

Google wants more feedback from professional SEOs and developers : See Google Caffeine in Action

My initial review is somewhat freighting as several of my front page listings (for terms like my name) have disappeared, while my social network areas (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) now rank much higher. While somewhat concerning, I’m optimistic this platform shift could cause the same type of headaches for SEO clients of our competitors, and drive new business to BlitzLocal. The key now is getting ahead of the curve with research and experimentation.