The other day I stumbled upon an article which gave tips on how to choose a domain name and how important is the presence of keywords in the domain name or URLs. I just skimmed through it and here’s what I feel would be a good domain.

Short and keyword rich
If you have SEO in mind then a good domain name is very important for your business. First and foremost it should have your keyword. In addition, it should be short and easy to remember. Being in the SEO industry I can safely say that URL’s of pages and the anchor text of links linking to these pages play an important role in Search Engine Optimization or SEO. The presence of an appropriate keyword in the domain name will do no harm to your SEO campaign as most webmasters generate links by making use of the business name in the anchor text. This will make sure that your keyword is present in the anchor text as well as the URL.

Long may do
There may be a possibility that you don’t get a short domain name which incorporates your most general keyword. In this case a long domain name (not more than 3-4 words) can be considered. For example let us assume that you are an internet marketing service provider and you can’t get a domain by the name of internetmarketing.com. Here a domain name such as internetmarketingusa.com may also serve the purpose as it gives an idea of your business and geographical location.

Country TLD may be useful
These days major search engines like Google have separate sites for each country and they give importance to the sites which are hosted locally. In this case a country code top level domain would be ideal for a business owner who wants to target a select geographic location. Let’s say that you want to sell a certain product or service only in the UK then in that case a domain.co.uk would be best suited for you.

Some may argue that in choosing a domain name with keywords you compromise on the branding, but I feel that’s the risk worth taking because good conversions are more important than branding.

Sitelinks are the links shown below some sites in search results and  are meant to help users navigate to your site. Google analyzes the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they’re looking for and when it does find something suitable then it creates a sitelink. This is what a sitelinks look like

Sitelink

There need to be atleast three sitelinks created by Google for a particular site for the sitelinks to be displayed. The unfortunate part is that we cannot tell Google to create  sitelinks according to our choice, it does so on its own. However once Google does create a sitelink and if you dont want that particular link to be displayed then you can block it. Simply go into webmaster tools, there go to the sitelinks option and block a particular sitelink. Once blocked within a few days Google stops showing the sitelink and the sitelink remains blocked for a 90 day period. If you want that sitelink to be blocked for more time then all you need to do is just go to the sitelink page on webmaster tools. Each time you do so the sitelinks will be blocked for an additional 90 days. You can unblock a sitelink whenever you wish too

So how do sitelinks help an SEO campaign? Many a times it might happen that Google might create sitelinks of pages that you think people might not visit frequently  or more importantly you feel that there are many more important pages that deserve a sitelink. Then if you block a sitelink, Google automatically will create some more  relevant sitelinks.  Having irrelevant sitelinks might deter users from visiting your site and that is definitely not something that you want to happen.

It has been 10 long years since Google entered our lives and it has gotten better with age. It’s fascinating to know that a company started in a California garage by two Stanford PhD students today dominates almost 80% of its business market and has offices world wide.

Not many people know that the word Google is derived from the word googol which is a mathematical term for a number which has the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. Also, Google was incorporated because one of their first investor s gave the founders a check which said Google Inc in the payee’s column.

You will be surprised to know that Google’s first motive is to improve user experience by delivering most appropriate results for any query which users enter. Earning millions of dollars is just a by product of this. To confirm this we don’t have to go beyond Google’s home page. Considered the hottest property on the internet you will never find an advertisement on it. Just imagine the amount of money Google is willing to let go.

Over the years Google has turned out to be a playful company. You can confirm this by just glancing at the various logos which Google has used over the years. They somehow come up with a new logo for every occasion and have more than 300 different variations of their logo. Phew!! That’s a lot.
Google’s office in Silicon Valley called the Googleplex is an awesome place. You have free food and white boards everywhere. The reason for having white boards on walls of corridors, rooms as well as rest rooms (yes they have one there too) is that you never know when an idea might strike you. Employees are allowed to bring their pets to work and can decorate their own cubicle. Wow that’s a work place I would like to work in.

Well enough for now, more Google info in my next post, till then here’s wishing Google a Very Happy 10th Birthday.

The HTTP status codes in the 300 series indicate that the resource requested has moved or in some way been redirected to a new location.

HTTP Status Codes

Determining budget for PPC is very subjective. It does not depend upon the industry, to your competitors’ budgets, or to other such factors. It totally depends upon how aggressively you want to market your products/services.
Just bidding high and ensuring top rankings is by no means a way to measure success of your PPC Campaign. The one factor that determines the success of your ppc campaign is your return on investment. If you are able to garner profits from your ppc campain, then by all means it is a success.
There are no specific figures for a PPC campaign budget. It totally depends upon how much you want to spend. However, there are few basic variables that need to be considered when budgeting for a PPC account-
1.  Cost per conversion: It is very helpful if you have ascertained a value for cost per conversion. This decides the upper limit of your bids.
2. Number of conversions: An estimate of the number of conversions that you expect to achieve (per month).

The ideal way to determine your budget is to run a pilot. Decide a budget, run a campaign for a month. Analyze the cost per conversions, average cpc bid for keywords etc. Depending upon this analysis, scale the campaign.

Have you ever seen local listing appearing on the first page followed by the natural listings?  That’s one more service that Google provides us. Google Local Listing is a free web mapping service. You can add your business through local listings and rank prior to the natural listings. The local business results attract the attention of a user with the detailed map of the region with various results to choose from alongside. This in effect leads to a significant drop in clicks for results, despite being #1 right below the map. Even though your website is thoroughly optimized and has all the SEO elements in place but if it appears below local listing it affects your website traffic tremendously.  To maintain the website traffic, add your business through local listings and improve or maintain you website traffic.

I was checking the traffic of one of my website’s and I came across one new feature that Google Analytics has included. You can now compare the no of visits and the sales made on a particular day. There are various other attributes such as Page Visits, Avg Time on Site, Bounce Rate, %New Visit that could be compared with other attributes such as Revenue, Transactions, Average Value so on.

Google Analytics

This metric comparison should help us compare one-to-one attributes that will help us monitor the search engine traffic more carefully. By tracking the no of visits and sales we get for a particular keyword, we can implement the SEO element as and when required.

Sitemaps, as the name implies, are just a map of your site – i.e. on one single page you show the structure of your site. Sitemaps make navigating your site easier. Sitemaps have always been a part of good Web design practices but with the adoption of sitemaps by search engines, now they have become even more important.
Using sitemaps has many benefits, like easier navigation and better visibility by search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site. If your site is new, or if you have a significant number of new pages, then using a sitemap can be vital to your sucess.
Google Sitmaps uses a special XML format that is different from the ordinary html sitemap which is very important from SEO point of view. One might ask why two sitemaps are necessary. The answer is obvious – one is for humans, the other is for spiders.

Article marketing is a low cost advertising avenue that can be explored by many online businesses to promote their services/products. Articles can help you increase the credibility of your business within its market as well as attract new potential clients.

A great way to write your articles is to write about an interesting topic using “smart terms” as your main subject. “Smart terms” are specific keyword niches used in your articles. Articles can be distributed via simple syndication methods which furthers their distribution to content publishers that cater to those markets, thereby helping in obtaining free press space. Each article contains an author’s bio to provide references and contact information of your business. The body and the bio of the article allow you to provide hyperlinks that point to your website, thus generating more links that lead back to the website. As a result, over a period of time, as these articles get picked up by the search engines, you manage to create mass backlinks to the relevant pages of your website.

This not only enables you to get your articles to rank for smart terms that may not be possible to target on your website (a spello for example) but also gain an SEO value through the mass backlinks. All this eventually helps drive visitors to your website through the article.

You can write on a wide array of subjects and gain a lot of popularity through viral propagation, [also known as social media optimization ] via social networks such as LinkedIn, Facebook and social bookmark websites like Digg & Del.icio.us.

If you own an e-commerce website that markets a new product, it will require a considerable amount of time to get your product page indexed by the search engine spiders, acquire an SEO value & begin to rank. Hence, considering the amount of time involved for the above, there’s a high possibility that by the time your product page just manages to rank well you would miss out on a great opportunity to sell huge volumes of the product.

Article marketing could be a great way to counter this problem. You could write & distribute an article talking about your new product, build links within the body directly to your product page & the bio talking about the credibility of your business. Thus, the exposure to the deep pages of your website and number of backlinks to them can be increased greatly.

Directories are a well organized collection of websites/blogs/forums that make it easier for users to find websites related to different content. Each link on a directory includes a short description of the website.

Submitting your websites and blogs to directories is a good way to get some back links. Some also consider it a reasonable way to increase traffic. But is this really true and worth the trouble?

There are three types of directories:

1. Free Directories: Free directories accept all links for free. Some directories may not ask you for money but may require you to add a reciprocal link to their directory on your website.
2. Paid Directories: Paid directories require you to pay to get your link approved.
3. Both Free and Paid: These are directories that are a combination of Free and Paid directories. You can pay to have your link listed as a featured link and thus gain more exposure.

Directories provide you with useful back links and can act as a relevant source of traffic (However you rarely see any change in). Webmasters usually consider PageRank before submitting their site to a directory. Having a link on a directory with high PageRank can help improve your website’s PageRank and can help you get traffic to your site.

However, webmasters end up getting very less PageRank benefit and traffic from directories.

The reasons for this

1. PageRank – Eventhough some directories may have high PageRank for their homepage, their inner pages, where your link will be placed, rarely have any PageRank. Thus, your website’s PageRank does not get much boost.
2. Traffic – We have search engines to digg up websites for us without wasting any time. Thus, it is highly possible that your site won’t get much traffic from directories because not many people visit them to look for websites.

Now, is it worth the trouble? Yes! Submitting directories is still a good way to build some back links even if they may not boost your PageRank as much as you expected. Submit your websites/blogs to directories whenever you have a chance. Sooner or later, everything will all add up and you will notice the benefits. When it comes to SEO, every little thing counts.