Domain And Page Naming Tricks For Better SEO Results

If you have even a passing interest in the topic of SEO, then you should take a look at the following information. This enlightening article presents some of the latest news on the subject of SEO.

The importance of domain and page naming is obvious, but you might not have realized the connection to SEO. We all know that unless our domain name is highly recognizable and memorable then we won’t get many customers, but good domain names also matter when it comes to search engine rankings – the more relevant your domain is to your keywords, the higher it will be ranked.

Domain names are not that difficult to come by at this point. http://Godaddy.com puts out some great prices and they run all sorts of specials once you become a customer. The more domains that you buy the more that they like you. The basic concept here is that people who buy a few domain names are probably going to become pretty big on the internet. The more that you own the more powerful you are. Domain names are like land in the early eighteenth century. They are valuable and the owners become a sort of elite class on the internet.

The value of domains is difficult to determine until you have purchased one and worked with it for a while. The difference between owning your own domain name and hosting your site on a sub domain or in a subdirectory of a domain is huge. The impact on your ability to perform SEO operations increases drastically simply by the ease of clarifying your URL for the search engines and directories that you submit to.

There are even directories out there that do not except anything except for domains. These are the kind of elitist sites that I described earlier. Domain names are the only way to go if you want to have a seriously successful website that becomes a household name. Directories that do not allow non-domain names are there to protect an investment. If you have spent money on purchasing and hosting a domain name you probably aren’t to excited about seeing sites that haven’t dropped a dime on investment being rated above you. This is a sort of aristecratic mind set, but it is a natural tendency of the mind. There are plenty of directories out there that everybody is able to access, but there are some out there that are only for the elite sites of the internet.

If your SEO facts are out-of-date, how will that affect your actions and decisions? Make certain you don't let important SEO information slip by you.

This elitist attitude towards domain names is beneficial to your sites because it allows you to get an edge on other sites simply by buying a domain name. This investment is the most crucial SEO investment that you can make. There are very few sites around that get huge numbers of hits (10,000+ per month) without having their own domain name.

So what do you need to do to get these good rankings? Start off by choosing a domain that matches your website well, and you’re killing two birds with one stone. Your domain name and URL should reflect what you’re trying to accomplish from your site. For example: calling your website ‘thewebcorporation.com’ isn’t much good if it sells hot sauce. For hot sauce, http://deserthotsauce.com would be a better name – the desert’s hot, like the sauce! Don’t settle for anything that won’t make people want to come to your site. Using the name of your company for your domain name is also a good way to go. This is the fastest way of providing a good, quality description of what the visitor is going to. Many visitors will actually consider your domain name the name of your company anyway so you might as well name yourself something that you want to be called.

Most webmasters settle for safe, can't-go-wrong http://www.myname.com domains, because it takes time to be creative and think up good names that contain your keywords. You might consider getting some help from the people around you, as you never know what they might be thinking that could be great. You need to come up with a few ideas in case some are taken – you’ll be surprised just how many domains have gone.

Everyone always wants a .com, but you shouldn’t rule out .net, .org, .us and the rest. For example, if http://deserthotsauce.com is taken, you might find that people like http://deserthotsauce.us just as much.

You can't predict when knowing something extra about SEO will come in handy. If you learned anything new about &keyword% in this article, you should file the article where you can find it again.

About the Author:
James Mahony is the founder of Search Engine Optimization Tips - A site dedicated to Search Engine Optimization SEO Tips All About Domain Names Articles for Website Content
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Top 5 On-Page Search Engine Optimization Strategies

I reckon one of the most rewarding things you can do is to build a webpage and see it rank well on the internet, in particular search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN. Most internet newbies are absolutely ecstatic when they finally see one of their webpages rank well. To rank well there are a whole range of issues that you need to look at which include both on-page optimization and off-page optimization strategies.

The key strategies we will look at today in this article are on-page search engine optimization strategies. In reality, most on-page search engine optimization strategies will only make small changes in placement, but each small change will add up to larger changes.

There are five key elements you need to look at for on-page search engine optimization.

Item #1 – Use Your Keywords In Your Title Meta Data

One of the most important things you can do when it comes to on-page optimization is to use your target keywords in the title. For example if your page is about home loans in Florida, then you need to put into your title the keywords “Florida Home Loans” or “Florida Investment Property Loans”.

Item #2 – Use Your Keywords In The Meta Data

Whilst many search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN may not use the Description Meta tag and Keyword Meta tag, other smaller search engines do still use this information and because of this you need to ensure that you still use these meta tags. You also need to ensure that you use the keywords in the Keywords meta tag and as well ensure that you use the keywords in the description meta tag.

Further to this make sure that you when you are choosing the keywords for a webpage you only use one or two keywords in the page. From experience we have found that trying to use more than two keywords in a page just does not work and never results in good search engine positions.

I had a couple of building clients come and talk to me this week about helping them build more effective websites and we found their previous website builders had used general keywords that they were never going to rank well. In fact it turned out this one website developer had five other building companies in his stable and he was customizing his highest paying client to be ranked well and the rest were ranked poorly.

Ninety-Nine percent of the issue with the website was that their webpages were developed using generalized words which would never bring in quality traffic. The keywords where as the highest paying clients website were using specific terms, but on his site that were using terms like homes, home, builder etc. This meant that our clients could never in a million years rank well. Apart from that, even if they did rank well most of their traffic would be irrelevant anyway as they only build homes in Australia and in particular North Queensland.

Item #3 – Use Keywords In Your WebPages

All of the major search engines look at the material on each of your webpages and then assess its quality and ranks it according to that quality. If your webpages are not targeted to a certain issue then your webpage will not rank well. Your key objective in creating a webpage is to target your webpage to your customers and then optimize that page to the keywords your customers would use to find that page.

To make your webpages relevant, you need to include the keywords your customers are using into their webpages. In doing that the search engines will help you to get that message out, when we professionally develop a webpage we use keywords our clients customers are searching on but we ensure that we only have a keyword density of between 2 and 6 percent. Any more than that, your customers are going to consider you are using high pressure tactics and more so, the search engines call it keyword spamming and that can cost you big time.

Actually, it can have you and your website banned.

Item #4 – Use Keywords In The Title On The Webpage

We talked about Keywords in the Title Meta data but I also recommend that you use your keywords in the title of your webpage plus at the end of your webpage. When using HTML the easiest way to make your titles standout simply set your Title in a H1 format. If you are not familiar with H1 this is one of the standard formats in HTML.

Item #5 – Use Keywords In Your Page Name

One of the most misunderstood things people when creating their webpage do not do is to use their webpage keywords in the filenames of their webpages. The most recommended place for your keywords is in your domain names however in reality, you will find that you want 100 or so keywords for your website and the easiest way to use the keywords is to use them in the filename of your webpages. This way the search engines will still give you credit for using the keywords in this area.

To summarise there are five top on-page search engine optimization strategies you should be considering:

Item #1 – Use Your Keywords In Your Title Meta Data
Item #2 – Use Your Keywords In The Meta Data
Item #3 – Use Keywords In Your WebPages
Item #4 – Use Keywords In The Title On The Webpage
Item #5 – Use Keywords In Your Page Name

About the Author:
Chris Le Roy
If you are looking for more information on Marketing an Online Business or if you are looking for quality material to help you with copywriting - Free Example of Sales Letters or you just want more info visit Your Online Marketing Business Opportunity
Content Provider: http://www.my-articles.com

Top Four Key Issues - You Need To Consider When Choosing Keywords For Your Domain

I have spent the last three weeks working with one of my new clients. They have been building their own website for over three years, spent $20,000 and have virtually no traffic. Like many people on the internet, they saw an opportunity to license some material from another company and did so in the promise they would make money. Yet to their distress they have never ranked well online and have never had high levels of traffic.

This particular client has spent thousands of dollars on building email lists using Adwords to assist in driving traffic their way. They are fast running out of money and becoming very distressed. The client has spent lots of money paying other people to get search engine traffic but has never achieved a good ranking and in some search engines did not even register an existence.

Two weeks ago we worked out what keywords would suit the licensed products that the client had purchased, built a website based on the sales pages the licensor had provided and using the right keywords this client has now achieved the most outstanding results.

The client achieved within 1 week of the site being live a #1 ranking in Yahoo.com on a keyword. A number one ranking is predicted to bring about 50 hits a day. The website also achieved a number 2 ranking in Google.com on a keyword which is predicted to bring about 150 hits a day. The reason our client achieved these outstanding results was simply because of the process we followed in choosing the right and appropriate keywords for the domain and key webpages. I should note that whilst the client will only pull about 200 hits a day on this one key world, we expect to make 3 to 5 sales a day for a $300 product. If you look at the numbers from the best case scenarios, the sales will pull $1,500 a day US which works out to about $10,500 a week and about $500,000 a year. Not bad for one single keyword.

There are four key issues you need to consider when trying to choose the right keywords for your domain name.

Issue #1 – Identify The Actual Words Your Customers are Using To Search For Your Products

One of the biggest mistakes many people make is to not do the research to identify the actual keywords your customers are actually searching on. In fact I have found that often what a client thinks their customers are using to search for their products is totally different to what their clients actually search on.

There are many tools on the market to help you do this and there are new ones coming out every week. My team and I use a range of tools like WordTracker and Overture to develop lists of keywords our clients customers are actually searching on. I find that Wordtracker is a fantastic tool for this.

When you are trying to use Wordtracker, I recommend that you start your searches with just a single general word about your product. This will give you a full list of all the words and a range of important information.

Issue #2 – Identify the Right Keywords with Minimal Competition

When you work with Wordtracker the system will give you a range of information about your keywords including the number of competing sites by search engine, the total number of hits per day in total to expect and a prediction of the number of hits per day by search engine. There are two issues you need to consider. One is the number of competitive sites for the keywords and the second is the number of hits you can expect.

The number of competitive sites is the most important issue to look. Keywords that have few competitive sites are much better to go after than those keywords that have lots of competitive sites as it can take a while to rank well. For example, my team and I have been going after a general term which currently has about 900,000 competing sites. The downside is that it takes a lot of work, lots of articles and a lot of time to achieve a number one ranking. In particular it has taken us 4 and half months to rank in the top twenty and we expect it to take another 2 months to get into the top five.

I know of one company that wanted to rank well for the keywords "wholesale hats" and that it took them 6 solid months of writing articles and building back links to be ranked well in the number one position. When you are starting out, you will want to make sure that you choose low competition websites. Now here is the interesting issue, just because a keyword has 1 million competing webpages does not mean that its going to be hard to rank well. What you need to do is to identify how many backlinks the top competitors has for the keywords. If the top competitor's webpages have only a few links to their page or even their site then you may find it very easy to top those webpages.

One of the aspects to consider when choosing your keywords is to make sure that your general keywords are in fact included in the domain name. For example if you were creating a website on Asthma, then in your domain name, you would want to include the keyword Asthma but it is unlikely you would get Asthma.com. However you would want to include the term asthma as the search engines give a better ranking to those that have the keywords in the domain, simply due to relevance.

Remember one key issue, the more relevant your keywords and domain, the more likely your website will rank highly.

Issue #3 – Identify Keywords with Good Daily Hits

The next issue you need to look at is the number of daily hits you can expect using those keywords. If the only keywords you can get with low competition webpages have 10 to 30 hits per day, then it is going to be a long haul.

The best type of keywords are those where you have a couple of hundred hits per day, preferably a thousand plus a day and only a few competing webpages. One of the sites we did for one of my clients had 350 daily hits per day but only had 104 competing webpages. This number of competing webpages is minute and it will not take a huge amount to get a top ranking position.

Issue #4 – See What Your Competitors Are Doing With Your Keywords

The next issue you need to look at is which keywords your competitors are using. When you are trying to work out your domain name you need to weigh up what your competitors are using to secure your customers, what keywords they are using in the keywords section of their meta data and what keywords they are using in their webpages and the text in their hyperlinks and their domains.

With all of this information you need to then balance out which keywords will give you the best results. Knowing what keywords your customers are searching on, which keywords have the least competition, what keywords your competitors are using and the total number of hits per day on your keywords will help you choose the right domain.

Oh and there is one other issue in all of this that you need to consider, is the domain with the keywords you have chosen still available?

Look the bottom line is that you want to build sites that are relevant and bring value to your customers and also to the search engines. If your websites do not do that then you will never be truly successful. All of the most successful websites in the world actually follow this credo.

About the Author:
Chris Le Roy
If you are looking for more information on Marketing an Online Business or if you are looking for quality material to help you with copywriting - Free Example of Sales Letters or you just want more info visit Your Online Marketing Business Opportunity
Content Provider: http://www.my-articles.com

Keyword Targeting Strategy In Your Site

Once the keywords have been decided for the site one has to come up with a strategy to target those keywords across the site. Here is a primer on that.

Keywords Targeting Strategy for Keyword of Single word:
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Keyword of Single word is useful to attract general audience and helps in getting high rank ,if the web site is new. Keywords Targeting Strategy for Keyword of Single word is that they should be more used in the root level pages or top level domain pages. This is because these pages are the ones that attract the general traffic & are generally the pages which do not specify specifics. Hence single word keywords based on themes can be targeted for on these pages.

Keywords Targeting Strategy for Keyword of Multiple words:
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Keyword of Multiple words are useful for attract targeted audience therefore should be used topic wise for each page according to subject of that web page. Relevant set of Keywords should be use in Title tag, Header Tag, Meta tag, Body tag, Alt tag, Anchor tag, Comment tag and in the url (uniform resource locator) of that specific web page. Use underscore or hyphen to differentiate Keywords. These keywords are normally targeted upon in deeper level or sub directory level pages.

Keywords Targeting Strategy for Keyword based on Theme:
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Keyword based on theme is useful to attract targeted audience therefore they are strongly recommended to be used. Typically, although it is not a hard and fast rule but in theme based keyword we use general keywords in root level and uses specific keyword in directory level.

Overall one can safely say that in keyword targeting one uses a dart board strategy. Wherein the smallest circle attracts your core audience & hence should have theme oriented multiple word keywords. As we move up on the theme (dartboard) the circle ( traffic) tends to get larger & the keywords tends to get simpler( singular) even though they are theme based.

KEYWORDS and KEYPHRASES usage in Domain Name:
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Keywords and keyphrases use in Domain Name & urls of directory pages is also a factor in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as well as it helps to inform targeted audience, about the sites content . Therefore, special care should be exercised in choosing a domain name. All the search engines start reading each web page with its respective domain name.

Having said that, let me add that there is a raging debate amongst the seo community to determine the exact importance of keywords in the domain name. One camp believes that it is hugely important to have keywords in domain whereas the other maintains that brand building domain name is more important than keywords incorporating one.

Whether keyword is a factor or not is debateble however it has been observed that domain name extensions do definitely play a part in rankings. Search engines ( specially google) have a predilection for sites having extension .gov,.edu,.mil in domain name. Search engines believe that information available at these domains would have a greater likelihood of being authentic as no commercial interest is served here.

Domain Name can be classifieds into two categories:

1. Keyword Specific

2. Brand Name Specific

Keyword Specific Domain Name
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When Keywords and Keyphrases are used in a Domain name then its called Keyword specific Domain name.

Keyword in the domain name to my mind has two advantages.

One It is better to have a keyword domain name for it is worth remembering that most of the people link to you using your URL. If your URL has the keyword or the keyphrase then you are automatically using the keyword in the very important anchor tag.

Secondly, though marginally, in a ranking scenario with every other parameter remaining equal, the Keyword Specific Domain Name will enjoy a slight edge over the other web site. However remember Keyword used in Domain name should be primary and generic. Specific keywords can be used in the sub domains. Read about the use of subdomains.

Keywords and Keyphrases uses with hyphen/underscore in Domain name are said to preferred as they are read by search engines as separate words. So the domain name can have a search phrase incorporated into it. However the flip side of it is that domain names with hyphen or underscore are inconvenient to carry.

Brand Name Specific Domain Name
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When company or organizations’ name is used in Domain Name to brand it then it’s called as Brand Name Specific Domain name.

Brand Name Specific Domain Name does not help online searches at all. However they are very powerful tools for company identification in the mind of users. In the anonymous online world a brand spells loyalty, trust & value. So if you choose to go for building your brand rather than deep rooted optimization, one way of incorporating keywords is through your directories & pages names.

KEYWORD DENSITY
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Keyword Density is a proportion of the searched term ( Keyword or Keyphrase) against the whole words written on a given page. The ideal Keyword Density is 6%-8% though various search engines have various tolerance levels before their spam filters get activated. Higher Keyword Density does help to boost a pages’ ranking.

Keyword Density can be increased by using target keywords repeatedly in Title tag, Header tag, Body tag, Comment tag, Alt tag, Anchor tag, Paragraph Tag , Domain name and in diretory/page names.

However one disadvantage of trying to hike the keyword density is that the visible text on the page starts to look spammy if it is not carefully crafted. That makes for a bad copy.

About the author:
Rakesh Ojha
I'm an Online Marketing consultant at Mosaic Services- an SEO Company. I regularly write and submit articles on various SE specific topics.
To find more articles, please visit my site http://sem.mosaic-service.com
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