Domain Name - Keywords or Business Name?? What do you Use?

Are you just looking to start your online business?

Are you creating a website for your 'bricks and mortar' business?

At some point in time before your website goes live you will need to register a domain name.


What factors do you need to consider when you choose a domain name?

Do you just choose your business name?

Do you incorporate your keywords?

Do you include your location?

Do you separate the words with hyphens?

How much are you prepared to pay?


The answer to these questions?? IT DEPENDS.


Let me take you through a scenario. I am working with a business selling computers in the retail market. The business is named after the founder of the business - 'Sullivan Computing' and is based in California.'

This business has been established for a long period of time and is well know in its local area.

BUT it is looking to expand its business across the US, into areas where it is less well known?

What domain should you register?

Would you register www.sullivancomputers.com

Or would you register www.buycomputerusa.com?

2 Rules for Choosing a Great Domain Name

Rule Number 1 for choosing a domain name - MAKE It Easy to Remember

Rule Number 2 - Make it Search Engine Friendly by including relevant keywords

Do you include your Location?

Would I include the location? Not in this case because the business is looking to service the US market. If you have a local business you may benefit from including the location. And I would certainly include your location in your page title and meta description.

Would I use hyphens?

Hyphens can make your domain name difficult to communicate to people. Same goes for fullstops. It can however significantly reduce the cost of the domain name. It may also mean the difference between being able to register the domain name and it not being available at all.

Have a look at GoDaddy.com and search for your desired domain name with and without hyphens. And compare the difference.

www.buycomputerusa.com - $2232.50

www.buy-computer-usa.com - $13.21

BIG DIFFERENCE in terms of cost. Minimal difference in terms of search engine performance.


Can you get the benefit of both??

YES.

What would I do in this instance?

Depending on the budget I would

1. Register www.sullivancomputers.com

2. Register either www.buycomputerusa.com or www.buy-computer-usa.com or www.buycomputer-usa.com

3. Place a permanent redirect from www.buycomputerusa.com to www.sullivancomputers.com

Make sure you get the redirect done properly.

That way you get the benefit of people already knowing your local business and being able to find your website easily. And you also get the benefit of including some of your keywords in your domain name so you get some extra search engine ranking power.

For more info on keywords check out my post on Keyword Research for Business Websites.

Domain Name - Keywords or Business Name?? What do you Use?

Keeping up with the Jones' could be vital to your Business Success

One of the major challenges facing business owners' doing business on the internet is that there is so much info out there that keeping up with everything that is going on can be a major challenge.

Unfortunately if you use all of your time scouring the internet for every last piece of information relating to your industry then you have no time to actually do anything.
But you need to stay up to date with what's hot.

How do you do this?

One of the tools that I use from time to time to monitor what is hot on the internet is Trendpedia



Trendpedia is a great tool for monitoring what is being talked about in your industry or niche on the social media websites.

You can compare different topics within your industry to see which one is hottest at the moment.

When you do a search you see a few different results.

1. You see the number of posts per day that relate to your search term. If you have done a comparison then you will see the number of blog posts per day for each term.

As a general rule, if no one is posting about it then don't waste your time.

There are a couple of exceptions to this rule.

If you are in a very specialised industry then there may not be many posts. This is a great opportunity for you to dominate the search engines by posting new content regularly.

If you think you have the next greatest thing since sliced bread that no-one else knows about yet.

2. You see the pattern of blog posting on a daily basis.

Did you ever wonder how often you should post on your blog, or what days you should post on. You can review the pattern of posting and get some answers to your questions.

Follow the peaks and troughs.

Remember it is a bit like the sharemarket. As a general rule you should follow the trend.

3. You see what is being said on Twitter about your subject or subjects.

At the bottom of the screen you can see who is saying what on Twitter about your industry. You can click on the graph and break this down to daily information for your subject.

I find this a great way to monitor Twitter quickly and easily without having to run Twitter applications that suck up my computer memory and can be very distracting.

Does your business have a social media strategy?

Not sure what to post on your blog?

Not sure when or how often to post on your blog?

What is the competition doing?

I have found this to be a great tool to answer all of these questions without taking up a huge amount of my time.

Does it just reinforce what you already know about your industry or are there some different things going on that you need to be aware of?

Keeping up with the Jones' could be vital to your Business Success

10 Essential Tools for your Online Business

In this day and age as the owner of a small to medium business it is getting harder and harder to keep up with everything.

What is going on with the online world?

What is going on in the offline world?

It makes it crucial that you are able to work smarter so that you can get more done in less time.

Here are 10 tools that I use everyday to manage my activities so that I can at least try to keep up with everything.

1. Google Analytics

It is vital that you can see exactly what is going on with your website very quickly. There are some paid packages out there that do offer more than Google Analytics, but this is FREE and it tells you pretty much everything you need to know.

2. Google Webmaster Tools

OK. I am not on the Google payroll for pushing their applications but they do have some good stuff. Want to know what search terms you rank for, how many links your website has, how often the Googlebots crawl your site, do you have any errors that need attention. Again this tells you pretty much everything you need to know about your website.

3. Social Twist

Tell-a-friend by Social Twist lets you share you and your customers/readers share your content in the social media world quickly and easily with only 1 button. I must say that I love this widget and the traffic to a couple of my sites has gone up 1000% since I started using it. Twitter, Facebook, Digg, Reddit, Stumbleupon - they are all there and more. If you want more referrals to your website from social media you have to be using this.

4. Blogger

5. Wordpress

I have said it before, and I will say it again. You must have a blog for your business.

If you are going to use an offiste blog then use Blogger. If you want your blog onsite then I would use Wordpress. Not sure if you want your blog onsite or offsite then check out my post about onsite blogs vs offsite blogs.

6. Evernote

If you are like me you probably get 1000's of ideas every day. And it is hard to keep track of them all. Using Evernote is a great way to keep track of those ideas. Jot them down, attach a couple of relevant tags and you can easily go back and find them when you want them.

Saves you racking your brain trying to remember that great idea you had yesterday but can't remember now. Happens to me all the time.

7. Deskaway

Have you got a bunch of projects that you are working on. Maybe you are part of a team working on projects. Deskaway is a great way to manage your tasks and projects so that you can keep track of what needs to be done when and by whom.

I use it because it helps to keep me focussed on what I am supposed to be doing at the moment, and it gives me a clear picture of exactly what I have on my plate at the moment.

If you ever find that you spend a lot of time thinking about how much you have to do and not so much time actually doing it, then Deskaway is a great way to get focussed on doing what needs to be done.

8. FeedDemon

Keep track of what is going on in your niche or industry quickly and easily by using FeedDemon. This allows you to monitor the relevant blogs in your industry from 1 platform. I use to set up the RSS feeds from the blogs I liked to look at straight on my iGoogle home page. But then I found there was too many. So, I started to use FeedDemon. You can see which blogs you look at the most and which you don't look at so much.

Part of being a business leader in your industry is staying tuned to what is going on in your industry. Keeping up to date with the latest trends is a big part of your success and this is a quick and easy way to do that.

9. Google Alerts

Google Alerts is another way that I monitor the web to find out what is going on in my industry. You can set up alerts for specific keywords and phrases and then Google will monitor the internet and send you an email when something new that relates to your keywords is published on the web. I get about 4 or 5 alerts daily and I can then click on the links and see quickly what is being published.

10. Firefox

Part of being efficient on the internet is having a great browser. I use Firefox because I find it has less quirky bits than Internet Explorer and there are a whole bunch of great add-ons that you can use with it to further enhance your browsing. Stay tuned for a post next week about Firefox add-ons for your business that you should be using.

I know when you get used to something it can be hard to change but if you have not tried browsing with Firefox I would definitely go check it out.


OK, so you probably already knew about most of these tools. My question for you is - How many of them are you actually using?

Knowledge without Action is just a waste of knowledge. Take your knowledge and put it into action to enhance the success of your online business and your lifestyle.

Have you got online tools for your business that you use everyday that you think are vital to your success? Would you like to share them?

10 Essential Tools for your Online Business

Are customer error's costing you business?

Let me give you a little tip.

Not all of your customers are as computer savvy or internet savvy as you.

Let me give you another tip.

You probably have some links on your website that are broken.

So what happens when one of your potential customers tries to navigate to a page on your website that does not exist?

What happens is that they see an error page.

And what most business owners do not realise is that you have complete control over the page that they see.

Yet if you don't take control of this then they will see a default page that will look like one of the pages below.





















These are just generic error pages that browsers display. They are usually just a collection of links to other websites.

Before you go any further with this post, go and test your website and see what kind of error page you get. Just type in an address for a web page that does not exist on your website and see what comes up.

Customers that see your error page are at a defining point in their relationship with their business. They will do one of two things.

1. They will leave your website and go somewhere else. This is the most likely option.

2. They will hit the back button on their browser and hopefully go back to the last functioning page on your website they visited.


You do have control over the error page that people see on your website.

Take a look at the Amazon.com error page. Quite simple, but with a prominent link back to the Amazon home page. This sends a message to the customer that Amazon want them to stay on their website.



Is your error page costing you business and losing you customers?

You do not need a fancy error page. You just need something that keeps people on your website so that you can build a relationship with them.

What does your error page look like?

Are customer error's costing you business?

Top 5 OnPage SEO Factors for Optimising your Website

I believe in getting bang for my buck. I like to maximise the return on investment for my time and money so that I can get more done in less time and with less money.

In that regard I don't imagine that I am too much different to anyone else.

So, when you look at optimising the content of a webpage, what areas do you need to concentrate on.

Before you do anything you must know what keywords you are looking to target. If you want more information about how to do your keyword research check out my post on keyword research for your business.

so, once you know what keyword or phrase you are looking to target on your page there are 5 main areas of onpage content that have a major bearing on how the search engines will treat your website.

1. URL

Other than the home page of your website (which is probably index.html), you should look to include some keywords in the URL of the pages on your site.

eg. if you are a web designer, the url for the main page on your website that relates to your web design services could be something like 'www._______.com/websitedesign.html'.

2. Page Title

This is a crucial piece of information to tell the search engines what your page is about.

If you are calling your home page 'Home Page' then you need to take a long hard look at your website.

I just did a Google search for 'home page' and guess what sites come up on the front page. Websites like BBC, Wikipedia, NASA, Microsoft, CNN, iGoogle, Adobe, Mozilla, Opera and Apple.

That is some pretty tough competition!! And even if you did get on the front page is it likely that your potential customers are typing the search term 'home page' into their browsers in an attempt to find your website.

Make your page title relevant to what your business does and include a call to action to get people to click on your link.

eg. 'Professional Freelance Website Design - Free Website Reviews available to make your website perform better'.

3. Meta Description

This is the part of your page that describes to the search engines what this page of your website is all about.

It also appears in the search results underneath the page title.

Do not overdo the keywords and use some words and phrases related to the main phrase that you have used in your URL and title.

Sell benefits of your product or service because this will come up in the search engine results. Give people a reason to click on your link.

4. The Main Heading

Because people tend to scan web pages rather than read them comprehensively you need to be using headings within your content to break up the text and give the readers a clue as to what the content is about.

These headings are coded into your webpage using the 'tags' H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6. If you don't know any HTML don't worry. Just look at the main heading on your page. This should be the H1 heading.

First question is, 'Is there a main heading?'

Are there any headings at all?

If there is a main heading does it contain your keyword or keyphrase or something very close to it?

If not, this is another area you can make significant improvements to the SEO of your website. Look at the content of your page and for each paragraph write an appropriate heading that utilises one of your keyphrases.

At the top of the page, write a heading that relates to the content of the whole page, and also uses your keyphrase or a related phrase.

Your main heading may even be the same as your page title.

Search engine robots also scan the code on your page looking for the heading tags to find out what your page is about. Use specific terms, rather than no terms at all or a generic term.

One of the most common generic terms I see on websites is the term 'products'. Do a Google search for the term products and see who you are competing against.

5. OnPage Links

These are the links on your website that point to other pages on your website. They might be in your navigation menu, or in the content of the page. this is another great place to use your keywords.

(Come real close just for 1 minute. Closer. Closer. I don't want anyone esle to hear this)

DO NOT USE 'CLICK HERE' to link to another page on your website. Sorry for shouting at you.

When Google spiders follow links over the internet one of the ways they know where they are going to is the text associated with the link they are following. It would be a bit like driving down the highway and seeing a roadsign that said 'There". OK, so you would know you were going 'There', but would you really know if you wanted to go 'There' or not. You would much rather know you were driving to LA or Sydney, as opposed to 'There'.

Just for one last exercise, do a Google search for 'Click Here' to see what websites you are competing against if you use this term to identify your links.

And, are your customers really going to be typing 'Click Here' into Google to try and find your business?

Top 5 OnPage SEO Factors for Optimising your Website

Business Blogs - Onsite or Offsite

A blog is a great way for a business owner to add fresh content to their website quickly and easily without having to engage their web designer.

As a business owner one of the things you need to decide is do you want your blog to be onsite or offsite.

Here are some of the pros and cons for both scenarios. Each has their advantages and disadvantages and you need to decide which one best suits your business situation.

Onsite Business Blog

Advantages of having your blog onsite include -

1. It is easy for your visitors to find your blog.
2. You can add new content to your website quickly and easily.
3. Search Engine ranking benefits of being able to add keyword related content to your website and being able to feed your website with new content on a regular basis.

Disadvantages

1. Your links will count as internal links rather than external links
2. If you are not a web designer there will be a cost to add a blog to your website.


Offsite Business Blog (eg. Blogger)

Advantages

1. You can link back to content on your website as external links
2. No setup cost

Disadvantages

1. You won't be able to add new content to your main website. You could use a product like RSS Content Builder to get around this. There is a cost associated with this.
2. No direct search engine benefit to your main website. However if you can build you offsite blog so that it gets noticed by the search engines you will get some benefit when you make links back to your main website.

Regardless of whether or not you have an onsite blog or offsite there are some key things you must do to ensure your blog is successful.

1. Have a plan to post content to your blog on a regular basis.
2. Make sure the theme of your blog is consistent with the theme of your website and your business.
3. Create an RSS feed using a service like feedburner.
4. Use Zimbio to share your content. Check out my post on sharing your content for more information about Zimbio.

Make your blog fun and interesting and share useful content with your visitors and customers.

Business Blogs - Onsite or Offsite

Share your blog content with the Social Media World

It is no secret that social media must be one of the greatest ways to promote your business and content to the world.

You can even get your users to do it for you.

So I wanted to share with you quickly one of the best and quickest ways that I have found to automate this process, and make it really easy for you and your users to promote your content.

Given the large numbers of social media sites it can be quite time consuming to setup all these submission gadgets on your blog, they can take up a lot of space, and often it makes it too hard for your readers to be bothered doing it.

So, how about one gadget that does it all for you. Twitter, FaceBook, Digg, LinkedIn, Stumbleupon, Myspace - you name it.

One of the blogs that I watch on a regular basis is Sitefling by Justin Brooke. You should check it out for info about web design and internet marketing.

I noticed a while ago on Justin's blog that he had a gadget on the bottom of each blog for sharing his posts. The gadget is Tell-a-Friend by SocialTwist.

Go check it out if you want to ramp up your blog profile. Make it easy for your blog users to promote your content and bring more traffic back to your blog.

PR: wait... I: wait... L: wait... LD: wait... I: wait... wait... Rank: wait... Traffic: wait... Price: wait... C: wait...

Share your blog content with the Social Media World

8 Week Challenge - Week 1 - URL's

Week 1 - URL Structure

Over the next 8 weeks I am going to cover various on-page factors that have a bearing on your ranking in the search engines.

Let me say firstly that any of these factors by themselves may not be make or break for you, however if you put them all together they will be very powerful for you in terms of how your site ranks in the search engine.

URL's are the first factor that we are going to deal with. The URL is the individual web address for each of the pages on your website. eg. www.yourwebsite.com/index.html. This is most likely the address for the home page of your website.

Some other common URL's that you might see for pages on a website are -

www.yourwebsite.com/products.html
www.yourwebsite.com/contact.html
www.yourwebsite.com/about.html

One of the more powerful ways to use URL's is to include your keywords into them.

If your business is a florist, rather than having www.myflorist.com/products.html you could have

www.myflorist.com/flowers.html
www.myflorist.com/roses.html
www.myflorist.com/giftsbaskets.html

This then puts some of your keywords into your URL's. It gives Google a better idea of what the page is about and this will help your search engine rankings.

Dynamic URL's

Dynamic URL's are a URL that is automatically generated for a web page each time the page is loaded. So, each time the page loads it will have a new URL. This is difficult for search engines to index and can hurt your search engine performance.

There are sound reasons for using dynamic URL's for a website, so if you have dynamic URL's on your website you should talk to your web developer about why you are doing this.

PR: wait... I: wait... L: wait... LD: wait... I: wait... wait... C: wait... SD: wait...

8 Week Challenge - Week 1 - URL's

The 8 Week Challenge - 8 Key On Page Factors for Having a Google Friendly Website

Web Page structure is a vital element of SEO. If your website is languishing on Page 553 of Google then there is a good chance that you are missing one or more of these factors.

If you want to draw tons of traffic from Google then it makes sense that you should make your website easy for Google to understand.

First let me say though that your website should be easy for your customer to understand. Here are 2 scenarios that both generate the same results -

Scenario 1 - Traffic NIL Conversion Rate 10% Revenue $NIL

Scenario 2 - Traffic LOTS Conversion NIL Revenue $NIL

So, effective website design should take into account both the search engines and your customers to bring you traffic, sell your product and make you money.

Here are 8 Key Factors for On Page SEO. Overt the next couple of weeks I will be dealing with each of these in more detail.

1. URL's - what is the structure of your URL for each page. Do they look like alphabet soup or are they search engine friendly?

2. Keywords - is your page optimised for your keywords? What keywords? How many? How often?

3. Title Tag - what is the title of your page and what does it tell Google about your page?

4. Meta-Description - what does this tell Google about your page? Are you using keywords effectively?

5. Users - don't forget the users. They are the ones that buy your products. Last I checked Google robots do not spend much money on the internet. They do however have a big bearing on where the money gets spent on the internet.

6. Content - what information is on your page. How are you using Headings? How are you using keywords? How good is your navigation? Do you have a sitemap?

7. Links - navigation links, in page text links, footer links. Are you using these effectively?

8. Test, Test and Retest - if you ever think that the work is done on your website you are heading for a fall. Times change, people change, search terms change. And each market is subtlely different. Constant and Never Ending Improvement is the key to great website design.

So, over the next 8 weeks, my challenge to you is to pick each 1 of these elements and get better at it. In 8 weeks time your website may be very different. Then repeat again for another 8 weeks.

PR: wait... I: wait... L: wait... LD: wait... I: wait... wait... C: wait... SD: wait...

The 8 Week Challenge - 8 Key On Page Factors for Having a Google Friendly Website

Websites Review - What to Look For?

As part of the service that I offer to potential customers I offer to do a review of their existing website. What do I look for when I do this review? I divide the review into 2 sections -

Section 1 - How search engine friendly is the website?

Section 2 - How user friendly is the website?

How Seacrh Engine Friendly is the Website?

The are a number of different factors that I look at to determine if a website is making the most of its search engine exposure.

Current PageRank, Links, Domain Data
To get a guage on where the website is currently at I look at its current Google PageRank, how many links it has in Yahoo Site Explorer, and how many pages it has indexed. I then also look at the age of the domain, when it was last modified, when the domain expires, and what is the last cache date in Google.

I find that this data gives me a good picture of where the site is at. If I am doing a more indepth analysis I will then look at the link profile of the website to see where the links are coming from, what PageRank the sites are that link into the website, and the age of the links.

MetaTags

I then look at the metatags for the website. What is the page title. 'Home Page' is not a useful page title yet I see it. What is the meta-description? Alot of sites do not have a meta-description. The title and metadescription are the bits of your website that appear in the search engine results. Your page title should contain keywords that your users are likely to be searching for, and your meta description should give them a reason to click on your link as oppose to the other ones on the page.

Keywords

Keywords are the other thing that I then look at for the website review. I still use the metakeyword tag (even though it is rumoured that most search engines ignore it). I find it useful to remind myself of what words we are targeting. Are your keywords in your page title? Are your keywords in your page headings? Are your keywords in your navigation menu? Are your keywords in your inpage links? Are your keywords in your footer?

Your keywords tell the search engines what your website is all about. It is vital that you make the best use of your keywords in all areas of each page on your website.

How User Friendly is Your Website

4 Second Rule

What is the first thing that capturesyour new visitor's attention when they land on your website? Does it compel them to look further? Does it tell them that they landed in the right place? One of the great challenges of efective website design is to create an instant and compelling message to your visitor that makes them want to look further?

Have a friend or colleague look at your website and tell you the first thing that they see. What captures their attention. Send it to me and I will do a website review for you.

If you fail the 4 second rule then your visitor is off looking at another website before you even had a chance to show them what you have to offer.

Colors and Fonts

The rule that I use here is to be consistent. Be consistent throughout the website, and be consistent with your business image. If your customer already knows your business then they will be looking for something familiar to assure them they landed in the right place.

Navigation

Is your navigation menu easy to identify. Does it utilise keywords? Do all the links work? Are you utilising insite links within your content?

That is the basic overview of a website review that I conduct for my clients. Feel free to add anything else that you think is important to you.

Websites Review - What to Look For?

Use Facebook to Promote your Internet Business

It is often thought that Facebook is just a social networking site where you can catch up with some people that you haven't seen for a long time.

However you can also use Facebook to promote your business. Create a separate business page to promote your business on Facebook. If you have a personal page on Facebook you can use this to promote your business page.

Use your Facebook business page to promote your business website and drive traffic from your business page to your business website.

This is one of many ways that you can drive extra traffic to your business website. If you would like to talk to me about other ways to increase traffic to your website check out my professional website design services.

Use Facebook to Promote your Internet Business