Thought this was a great follow up to the “importance of Focus” blog post.  Here a university professor shows the actual negative effect on the brain that multi-tasking has when compared to a singular focus.  So remember, whether it’s buying a new domain name, setting up your web-hosting, building your website, or getting traffic via search engine optimization… focus!

(Thanks to Rasmussen University for the infographic!)

And here’s the best part: According to what we’ve tracked as far as entries into the contest, YOUR ODDS ARE FANTASTIC:

ENTER NOW! You’ll be in an exclusive club.

DomainNameWire.com reports that online retailer Amazon.com has registered several domains related to holiday shopping. See DomainNameWire for the list.

Looking at Who.Is we found that Amazon’s legal department registered the domains for one year. This gives us reason to ponder something about their future. But first, why should your company register domains defensively?

1. Defensively registering domains can add to your search engine optimization. If you link your peripheral web addresses (domains) back to your main site, you rank higher with the likes of Google, Bing and Yahoo!.

2. It essentially builds a virtual fence of similar URLs around your brand. It keeps competition away from your trademark, while letting in customers from multiple locations.

3. Protects your brand from your detractors. Just ask United Airlines about Untied.com. A simple mistype and your potential business is reading horror stories about your service.

So about Amazon and their newly registered domains: The ones we saw were only registered for one year. If you’re going for SEO on your defensive domains, then register them for longer blocks of time. You’ll get more respect from the Googles of the world. In Amazon’s case, we think they may be waiting it out until they can own Amazon.Amazon, Kindle.Amazon and all the other second-level domains they can attach to their new dotAMAZON. Those pricey new dotBRANDS look to be available in January of next year.

For the rest of us, a good bet for protecting trademarks and brands will be buying the right (and competitively priced) domains.

So they go about this straightforward project and in less than ten days score half a million “likes” and so many wall posts they have to beg people to behave and follow the rules. 

What are the rules? Well, simple: share recipes. Now that’s about as Abigail Adams as you can get. This old-fashioned way of connecting people spun up in an electronic forum. And by golly they have 300,000 more fans since I checked the site last night. Soon they’ll be on Good Morning America, and we’ll be watching from our piles of press releases and flowcharts and wondering, “How?”

Since it has to do with food we at Name.com wanted to be a part of it. As the Community Evangelist I contacted the CPGs to see if we could provide them with a domain and a website that we could monetize and search engine optimize. Our customers really think we’ve got something with our PageZen web builder and SEO Tutor, and we’re very fond of them. But that really should be the litmus test: are you portraying your product even close to something that with a flip of a switch can feed your family for a week?

There’s another lesson: give people something they want. We’ve all been serenaded by the sales gurus hammering their fists and berating us about benefits: “Share the benefits of your product!” But the Crock Pot Girls have one up on that. Their product is a benefit with benefits. People want food. They want lots of it, and they want it to appear magically. The Crock Pot is all that. You put something in it, you turn it on, and then you do something else with yourself.  All you need is a recipe. In come the CPGs. Throw in the fact that the economy is weak and I’m surprised our ladies of the ladle haven’t been propelled to Congress.

At Name.com we’d love to hear that we’re the Crock Pot Girls of domains and website building.  We want it to be quick, easy and convenient, and as satisfying as a pound of pulled pork. We want to put you in that place where you can be any level of web IQ and still get your ideas and products on a website that ranks big with SEO. Actually, I think there should be some kind of buzzword introduced here. Something about a “Crock Pot” business plan (not to be confused with “Crackpot”) where you sit alone with the slow cooker and brainstorm how close you can get to its paragon of goodness.  If you don’t get all the way there, then don’t worry. It’s hard to touch moms with vats of food.

We wanted to follow up our second podcast (SEO Basics) with a video that shows some of the tips we discussed. In this video we once again use Beer Fridays as an example and show you how to edit your page title, meta data, and permalinks using WordPress.

There are tags in the video you can hover over to skip to the different sections. If you have any thoughts or questions, let us know in the comments!

Ok, it finally feels like winter here in Denver with the coming of Daylight Saving time and our first snowfall. Since it’s now dark outside when we leave the office, it means no more mountain biking. On the other hand, it’s a great time to get indoors and get some work done on website development and SEO!

If you’re interested in SEO and marketing your website this winter, you need to understand Google Caffeine and make it work for you. What is Google Caffeine? It’s the new search indexing system that Google announced in June of this year that provides 50% fresher search results than the older indexing system.

I Can’t Find My Website
One of the most amusing questions I used to get from web design clients is “you published the site yesterday but I still can’t find it in Google.” Actually it’s not very amusing if your the business owner and you’ve tied up a lot of money in development. However, this question does bring up the discussion of Google’s indexing system and what life was like before Caffeine.

When you do a search in Google you’re not looking at realtime data in the organic search results. It’s an index of sites and pages that are older – kind of like dusting off an old encyclopedia britannica and looking in the index to find certain topics.

In the past, even large sites would have to wait several days (sometimes weeks) before a new page was indexed and found in search results. However, due to the increasing demand for fresher content and user expectations, Google created Caffeine.

Here’s an image Google released earlier this year to illustrate Caffeine:

The bars on the left represent “layers” of web content which got refreshed at different rates. Bigger sites with high traffic would be refreshed the quickest – at the top of the list; smaller sites with less traffic were at the bottom of the list. With Google Caffeine, content is refreshed at a much quicker pace.

No Web Page is Unimportant
Really the best news about the change with Google’s indexing system is that even smaller sites can compete with the big guys. How? Google Caffeine analyzes the web in smaller portions and update on a continual basis so you can create new content today that gets found tomorrow. This is a huge opportunity for smaller sites to beat the big guys by creating better optimized pages with blogs, video content, etc.

Make sure that as you create additional pages for your site that you focus on good on page SEO for each page, knowing that Google wants to index the newest, most optimized pages in your industry. Your index page may not show up #1 in the search results but your sub pages might.

What? Blogging is Important?
Yes blogging is important because in Google’s quest to locate fresher content faster, guess what happens when your competition sits on their old, stagnant page content and you start creating weekly (or daily) blog posts discussing fresh topics and industry related content? You’re going to get found.

Just to illustrate, on the day after my last post about exact match domains, this page showed up on page one of Google (#4). As of today, it’s #9 for the search term “exact match domains”. In the past, we would have to wait some time to get content indexed quickly but Google Caffeine changed that.

In summary, you should seriously consider the opportunity this represents for your business. Look at your competitors. Do they have daily blog posts? Weekly? Do they have a blog at all? If the answer is no to any of these, think about generating lots of fresh, well optimized content via a blog and chances are you’ll be able to compete with at least some of your main competitors’ keywords – because of Google Caffeine.

Start making it work for you today!

Hey folks! For our second podcast we talk about a few basic SEO techniques you can use to optimize your website. As an example, we take a look at our very own BeerFridays.tv and discuss ways to get it seen by people who aren’t already in the Name.com network.

We also consider it a small victory that our second podcast attempt is 5 minutes shorter than our first. We’re getting better at this whole brevity thing. :)

Have any topics or specific questions you’d like us to cover in future episodes? Let us know in the comments or shoot us an email!

This is Art here from the business development team at name.com. Thanks for the warm welcome to the community! I’m very excited to start posting information here regarding SEO topics in the weeks ahead. For my first post I’ve decided to discuss search engine basics for small business. Enjoy!

Search Engine Basics for Small Businesses (SEO)
Do you have a website that is not getting any traffic? Are you thinking about starting a website for your small business but want to hold off on investing any time and money before first knowing that the site can get found by potential customers? If you answered yes to either of these questions, you will benefit by learning at least some search engine basics, which we’ll discuss in this post.  If you are looking for intermediate or advanced SEO information, watch for our future posts coming soon!

I’ve personally optimized over 300 websites over the last few years and roughly 85% of all those sites started getting found on page 1 or 2 of Google, Yahoo, or Bing within 3-6 months time (we’ll talk about the 15% of sites that didn’t get ranked later). What’s been amazing to me with this experience is to discover that it doesn’t matter how big or small a site is, there is a core set of principles which apply to every single website (in most industries) that maximize your chances of getting your website found near the top of the results in search engines.

Before we get started, here are some basic definitions that are important to understand:

Search Engine: A website such as Google.com which allows you to search for websites using certain keywords.
SEO: Search engine optimization, or changes that you can make to your site in order to make it appear higher up in search engines.
SEM: Search engine marketing, which refers to the combination of SEO and paid advertising (PPC) to make a website visible and/or rank higher in search engines.
PPC: Pay per click advertising, or sponsored links that appear in the search results, usually on the right hand column or in a different color near the top of search results.
SERPs: Search engine results pages, or what you see immediately after searching for a certain keyword in a search engine.
Keywords: The words that users type into a search engine to view web pages related to a specific topic.
Organic Search Results: The left hand side of the search results page which occurs “naturally” for a well optimized site (this is where you want to be because it has the highest ROI).
Backlinks: Incoming links or links from other websites coming back to your website.
Anchor Text: A certain keyword within the body of your website text which is a link to another location on your website.
Meta Tags: Information on your website which is visible only to search engines that tells the search engine what your site is about.

Now that you have  a few basic definitions, let’s talk about some specifics of SEO.

The Most Important Search Engine
There are three primary search engines that people most often use: Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Google is the big daddy of them all and 90% of your traffic will likely come from there. Therefore, you want to make sure you work hardest to impress Google above all others. How do you impress Google? You need to build trust and relevancy with your website by making your website content match the keywords you want your site to get found for.

Think about this from Google’s perspective. If you searched certain keywords and Google displayed websites that were completely unrelated to what you were searching for, you would probably stop using Google very quickly. This is why it does not work to stick popular, unrelated search phrases like “Michael Jackson” in your site text or meta tags. Of course there are lots of other things you should never do like hide keywords in the body of your content (using same color text as background, etc). We’ll talk more about “black hat SEO” in later posts. Just plan on being completely honest and transparent with your text content and Google will reward you by moving your site up higher in the search results.

The Meat and Potatoes of SEO
There are around 200 factors in Google’s algorithm (or so Google says) which determine whether or not your site will pull up high in search results. However, there are just a few main things that I consider to be the most important and which you should spend most of your time focusing on. The two most important things are:

• content
• backlinks

Over the years, I read lots of articles that talk about how content and backlinks are most important for SEO. However, it wasn’t until recently that this fact really solidified in my mind. At my previous employment, I analyzed the web traffic data from our top 500 customer websites. These top 500 sites were getting more traffic than all other 300,000+ customers being tracked in our system.

I narrowed down this list further to just 110 sites – the ones getting at least 50% of their traffic from organic traffic sources (the left hand side of Google). What I discovered is that these sites all had (not surprisingly) lots of content, backlinks, and fairly old domains. To be exact, these sites had an average of 387 pages, 1275 backlinks, and domains that were over 6 years old (see graph below).

What’s important to note here is that these sites weren’t doing many of the other SEO tactics correct. I discovered a lot of these high traffic sites had frames, slow loading pages, poorly written meta data, etc. but they were still ranked very well in search results. It’s the content, backlinks, and domain age which outweigh everything else in the world of SEO.

Content
So what makes good content? Again, your text content has to be relevant to your main topic or keywords you are trying to get found for. I built and optimized a website for an attorney from Texas last year and I was surprised to find that the majority of his text content he provided for the site was dedicated his favorite hobbies and TV shows – NOT relevant content.

In addition to having relevant content, you have to have lots of it. As noted in the example previously of the top 110 sites, several hundred pages of content were what drove those sites to the top consistently above the rest. Although it is not necessary to have hundreds of pages of content in most cases, you should have at least enough text content that describes every aspect of your business and products/services. If you run out of things to write about, think about the conversations you have with customers in person or on the phone – and put that dialog in writing. Write about anything you have knowledge of that’s related to your main focus and Google will love you. Also, keep in mind that creating many individual pages is better than having just a few very long pages of text.

Backlinks
Backlinks are the incoming links to your site from other websites. One way to think of backlinks is to consider them as votes for your site. The more “votes” you have the better, as long as those incoming links are primarily from sites that are popular and not just small sites without any traffic.  You can get backlinks by submitting your site to popular business directories, posting comments on blogs, or writing articles to large article submission sites, to name a few.

Domain Name Age and Keyword Domains
As noted from the study mentioned above, the sites that performed extremely well among all others were older, more established sites. Now, if you are starting up from scratch, your domain is going to be new unless you are building on an older domain you purchased previously. The best advice I have to choosing a new domain name is to pick something which includes the keywords you are targeting.

One of my favorite tools I use to select domains is our own domain suggestions tool at name.com. As you’ve probably noticed, nearly every domain name that matches your exact target keywords is not available. However, our system generates a list of available domains in order of SEO relevance. Another thing I really like about our domain suggestions tool is that you can have it scan through Google keyword suggestions which can reveal some very good domains.

A couple of years ago, I optimized a website for a dentist in Longmont, Colorado (near Boulder). The dentist was smart in that he previously registered dentistlongmont.com. After just a couple of weeks of working on his site, he started showing up on page #2 for Google, page #1 on Yahoo and page #1 on Bing with the keyword dentist longmont. This happened very quickly because his domain included his most relevant search term (and he had registered it two years prior so it had aged a bit).

Think Like a Gardener
In conclusion, I wanted to end by giving a little info about the timeline involved with SEO. In my experience, brand new websites and domains typically take around 3-6 months to rank very high in search engines (again, invest some time in selecting your domain name to shorten that time). Hyper competitive industries such as real estate, professional legal services, etc. can take the longest. One of the best ways to think about search engines and SEO for your small business is to think like a gardener.

You have to first prepare the ground, plant seeds, water, etc. then patiently await the harvest. It’s exactly the same with SEO. Plan on investing several months at least for your efforts to pay off. While you wait for your website to grow in popularity and move higher up in the SERPs, you might consider using PPC to support your SEO campaign.

Be sure to watch for future posts regarding SEO where we will give up all our SEO knowledge and give experts tips regarding link building, content development and tricks (all white hat), and much more!

Best Regards!
-Art

If you log in to your WordPress blog and scroll down, you will see a “Settings” section on the left hand side. Clicking the arrow will drop down a menu and one of the options will be “Permalinks.” Clicking that will take you to the Permalinks page where you will see the different options you can choose.

The default looks something like http://blog.name.com/?p=167 and that doesn’t really tell readers or search engines anything about your post.

This can be easily changed on the Permalinks page by selecting either the Day or Month options, or even adding your own custom structure using the syntax that WordPress provides. You probably want to stay away from the Numeric option, as that won’t do much for your SEO either.

After saving your changes, your blog URL will look like http://blog.name.com/2010/06/name-tip-better-seo-with-wordpress-permalinks/, which is not only better for SEO, but now your readers have information like subject and date just by looking at your URL.

We hope that helps some of you out there that may not have even known this setting existed. Cheers and happy blogging!

I’m in NYC for the Search Engine Strategies show. For those of you who do not know what I’m talking about, SES is the largest conferences dedicated to improving your visibility within search engines. Google and Yahoo! reign here. Whether your goal is natural/non-paid results or better placement in paid results.

In yesterday’s Domaining and Address Bar Navigation session Sedo’s Matt Bentley and Moniker’s Monte Cahn found themselves up against the anti-domaining duo of Point-It’s John Lisbin and Sendtec’s Janel Landis. The timing for the discussion couldn’t have been better due to Google’s recent announcement that advertisers will be able to opt-out of parked pages for their campaigns.

Bentley kicked off the conversation with a bit about perception skew. Based on later discussion I think that he was spot on. He’s point was that Internet professionals, and particularly SEO professionals, think that being found on the web is all about search navigation. He used the 1976 New Yorker cover cartoon about the geographic skew from a New Yorker’s point of view. Matt went on to talk about the various ways to use direct navigation as a viable, and often times, better option to paid search campaigns. Of particular interest was his assertion that a good generic domain name has an average ROI of 2 years, even with a price tag of $350k.

Matt was followed by PointIt, Inc’s John Lisbin. John started off attacking “cyber & typo squatters”. Which immediately put me on the defensive. It’s no secret that our industry has bad apples but to lump typo squatters into legitimate domainers borders on libelous. There was very much a vein of domainer as criminal. Further muddying the waters for the advertisers in the audience was the grouping of “made for Adsense sites and parked pages. Utilizing one of his customers bad experiences with a group of Adsense optimized sites such as UniqueChristmasGiftsA.com and about six others which were very similar. Clearly you cannot compare the traffic that would be driven to URLs of that nature (whether from link farms or arbitrage) to the natural type in of ChristmasGifts.com, can you?

Well, that very notion was the premise of Sendtec’s Janel Landis. Janel came out with both guns blazing. Janel claims that address bar navigation is almost exclusively an accident and visitors use any link on the page as a way out. Therefore she posits that any traffic from parked sites is not quality/qualified. The lone exception to her theory is typo domains. Yes, you heard that right. This search professional was espousing the value of typo domains to individual brands. She didn’t differentiate between whether the trademark holder or someone else was the domain registrant in her point, but both of the TurboTax typos that she used as examples were parked/monetized domains. In summary she maintained that traffic from parked pages was almost exclusively useless and she encouraged advertisers to opt out.

Monte Cahn, who was introduced as the Godfather of domaining (be sure to call him Godfather at TRAFFIC) batted clean up. Monte wrapped up things nicely by encouraging advertisers and mark holders to register the most frequent typos of their name and their brands. And, the savvy marketer that he is, he offered his company as the perfect company to help with that project.

I cannot stress enough the number of people here. These people are looking at improving their visibility via search. They are being told that parked domains are crap.

All of that talk by industry leaders about transparency and quality traffic? Ya, it’s a little important if you want Google and Yahoo! to keep domains in their programs at all. Arbitrage? It’s spoiling it for everyone. Link farms? Yep, those too. Concentrate on quality generic names. If you can’t land those you better start developing names into valuable resources. There are no shortcuts to making money with domain names these days. I’ll talk more later this week about ways to make money with domains. But for now I need to pay more attention to this session on Social Media Marketing. Ciao.