This trick uses two major components of organic SEO and local search, page title and a high-authority web presence. The results will vary dependent upon two main factors, the saturation of an industry and the competitiveness or size of the selected local area needed to be dominated.
The client used in this case study was doing business in Redlands, Ca., a small town in Southern California, east of Los Angeles. He moved up to another small town in Washington State called Mukilteo and now needs traffic from the new local area. We will first look at keyword popularity according to Google.
We begin by checking keywords in the free Google keyword tool by first typing in just one word, “graphic”. The client is a graphic artist and is looking for graphic design work. We start with one word to capture the most popular phrases and possibly find words or phrases we otherwise would not think of subjectively. The search terms “graphic design” and “graphic designer” show some of the highest search popularity, so we will use these. Usually, in performing local search optimization, we can just add the name of the area, City or State to the main keyword phrase and will do so in this experiment.
After we have looked at keyword popularity, we will look at keyword competitiveness. We find that the search for “graphic designer, mukilteo” yields about 13,900 related sites, a very small population of competing sites indicating that it may be easy to dominate quickly.
Upon our benchmark search, our client does not show up at all in the search for our selected term, he is nowhere. He also does not have a MerchantCircle account. The first thing to do is to create a MerchantCircle account for him. You start by entering in the phone number of the business. If a business has been around for a few years, at the same location, using the same phone number, there is a good chance you already have a listing. If this is the case, you just need to claim it. If you don’t have a listing, it is easy to set one up, and it is free.
When creating the listing the trick is to use the keyword phrase in lieu of the actual business name. You can also add the business name after the keyword phrase if there is room, it is important to keep it short, to 3 or 4 total words, as that is what will appear in the Google search results.
After adding the keyword phrase “graphic design Mukilteo” in addition to the business name in the new MerchantCircle account, we do another search and the results show the client as #2 in the Google search results, not bad for free.
It is important to note that MerchantCircle is a very large directory and will rise to the top of many searches because of that. It is also important to know that the more active you are with your MerchantCircle account, the more references to your listing you will have. In this case, with this client, I wrote a review of their work. The search results now will rank my client number 2 and number 3, number 3 being a reference to the review.
Mission accomplished. We went from being nowhere on the Google search results page to being number 2 and number 3 for a great search term within a day.
Incidentally, we placed number 1 and number 2 for the search term “graphic design Mukilteo” as well.
Try this for your local business and see if you get more traffic.
As of this writing domain names tied to geographic locations still seem to be available, for the most part. Many are “premium” domains, if purchased through GoDaddy.com, the world’s largest domain name registrar.
Getting a domain name that can help your local search results is dependent upon two things, 1. Your product or service and 2. Where you live
Every product and/or service is a different market, some are more saturated than others. If you were in the insurance business or an attorney, you would know that your industry is extremely competitive and may be at a high saturation level in your geographical area.
As a rule, the larger the city, the less chance you have at getting a domain name for local search.
Before we go any further, let’s talk about a local search domain. I am referring to a domain that is designed to exploit local search as much as possible. Let’s say you own a pizza place in Denver, Co., this is a highly competitive industry and market, and Denver is a very large city. The ideal domain name we would want to buy, and probably can’t get, is pizzadenver[dot]com or denverpizza[dot]com. A domain name for local search would include two items, 1. your product or service and 2. your location (or where you want to pull business from)
Smaller cities have not been gobbled up yet. I was able to buy redlandswebdesign.com about a month ago at the regular price, not premium price. Redlands is a small town east of Los Angeles. I was also able to buy socalwebsitedesigns.com a couple of years 11ago. With “socalwebsitedesigns.com” you can see another strategy, a nickname for the area you live in, this will work the same as the formal name of the city.
The first step to take is to check keyword popularity in either Google or Wordtracker free tool, and confirm that your product/service combined with the name of where you live are getting sufficient traffic. I wouldn’t consider buying any domain for traffic less than 1000 queries per month or so, it is up to you and your own discretion.
Check variations of your product name also in the keyword tools. “pizza place” may be useful in lieu of “pizza”. “auto repair” or “auto service” are two variations that can be attached to a city name.
If you find the domain you are looking for and it is a premium domain, in GoDaddy.com, the price can be negotiated. The harder you negotiate, the better price you will get the domain for. As a rule, they will reduce the asking price by about 30%, so don’t let the listed price throw you. It very well may be a good investment.
After you purchase the domain, to get full impact, your homepage must match the domain name. The closer it matches the better. If it is www.denverpizza.com, there must be references to “pizza” and “Denver” throughout the homepage, or landing page. Don’t put in an abnormal amount of references or keywords, keep it natural, doing otherwise is called keyword stuffing and it doesn’t work.
The main page the domain points to doesn’t have to be the homepage, it can be an interior page or landing page. This strategy is used for multiple domain names, names of a specific product tied to names of small areas, cities or towns. This is a viable strategy. These pages must match the domain name as well, to maximize effectiveness.
A major part of the Google algorithm is relevance. They measure it in many ways, one of the ways is via the relationship between keywords in the domain with the keywords in the landing page. Not only are the specific keywords checked, but also related keywords, as per their search data. Meaning, not necessarily keywords you think are related, they use their data. Without being privvy to their actual data set, it would be reasonable to assume that their data would be very close to the data shown by their free keyword tool, so I use that to find related keywords. I adjust prominence in relationship to popularity.
There are many free things you can do to help with your local search results, which I will address in future articles.
In my previous article, I focused on historical data of domain name value, type-in traffic, behavioral and purchasing habits of domain name buyers. In this article we will examine the specific elements of a domain that contribute to it’s value.
There are many elements that have contributed to the value of a domain, and they are changing all the time. For the forseeable future, it appears that domain names will continue to rise in value overall and could be a great investment. In the past 11 years, I have owned and/or managed over 500 domains. By comparison, I am not a big player in the domain name game, but in my expenditures of both time and money, I will share with you what I have learned in my experience.
This article does not address websites, only and exclusively domains. This is important to note as many domains for sale come with a website and it is important to differentiate between the two, they are two seperate, independent things. It is also important to note that a domain names value can be strongly effected by it’s association with a website or not. Let’s say you see a domain name for sale, and it is only the domain name that is for sale, not the website, and a measureable amount of traffic is attributed to that domain. There may be a good number of incoming links to the domain as well, contributing positively to it’s value also. If you pull the site away you pull away the content, if you lose the content, you lose the links, you lose the traffic, you lose the value. Be very careful in purchasing a premium domain.
Some domain names may have had a website attached to it previously, but are independent now. You can see if a domain ever had a website by visiting www.archive.org “wayback machine”. If you purchase a domain that used to have a website you have to be careful of what kind of site it was. It may have been a complete disconnect from your business or vision of what the domain means. This disconnect could cost you thousands and take a lot of time to “undo”. Check the history of a domain name.
Here are some of the major contributing factors in domain name value. In informal order of importance and relevance to value.
Length. This is an old one and has not changed. The shorter a domain the better, generally speaking. Keywords in domain. This is a plus but not a requirement. I have seen it be particularly effective for a very narrow channel or a singular brand, but it is not a requirement. .com still rules. When you can’t find the domain you are looking for with a .com ending you may be tempted to go to a .net or .org, or God forbid a .biz, .us or worse. It’s not fair to say that you can’t have a great website with an extension other than .com, but I recommend going with a .com as SEO best practices. Sometimes you can buy your .com version as a premium domain, and it may be worth the extra money. Existing traffic. This is a sticky one. This is what I addressed above. A domain name will only have traffic under 4 conditions: Existing or previous content that attracted traffic Incoming links that drive traffic and ranking due to “a.” Fake or PPC traffic. Details of this is for another article. Type-in traffic. Very hard to measure.
Brand-Match. This is one of the smartest ways to establish a good domain at a cheap price. You are able to choose any brand name you want for your product and many times able to find the .com version of it for less than $10.00 per yr. It is important to mention that when using this strategy you should support the domain with very a strong multi-media marketing campaign, the two work well together and increases your chances for success with both the brand and the domain.
Existing traffic to a domain is probably the biggest element of value. It can also be the most complex. Buying a domain that someone else owns is like buying a used car, but worse. There is no singular source for finding out the history of a domain like there is on a car, a VIN number. The only historical data you can find on a domain is very limited. There is no way to know what the previous owner did to drive traffic to that domain. It could all be legitimate but there are unlimited ways to drive fake traffic to a website. Fake traffic is invisible to a domain buyer and can also inflate the value.
Buying and transferring ownership of a domain is another thing and best fit for another article. This can be tricky and you can get ripped off easily if you are not careful.
Be very careful when spending money on a premium domain, I recommend using a professional domain name broker and dig up as much info as you can on the domain yourself.
If you have a new website, less than a week or so old, or are planning a new website, you should know that it will take a little time before Google "finds" it. Until then, you can't really expect to see any traffic.
When you perform a search in Google, the results do not show a "live" listing of websites. The Search Engine Results Page (SERP) displays sites that have been crawled and indexed by Google. The SERP is actually displaying what is in Google's index. One of the easiest ways to see if your website has been crawled (found) and indexed by Google is to check www.indexedbygoogle.com, it will display a simple "YES" or "NO". Really cool tool.
There are other reasons your website is not being indexed by Google. If it is a Flash site it cannot be seen by Google, there are other criteria such as the way the site is built, PHP, etc. that may deter Google from spidering the site, or portions of your site may be "visible" to Google and other areas not.
Use the "Search Engine Spider Simulator" tool on this page to see how a search engine spider "sees" your website. This will help you get an idea of what your website looks like to a search engine spider, AKA Googlebot, the Google search engine spider/robot.
If your site has not been indexed by Google, you need to submit the site to Google Local, which we will cover in the next post.
If you run a Facebook Page, you may be very interested in some new features that are rolling out for admins. Eric Eldon at Inside Facebook has discovered that some admins are starting to see impression counts for each post, as well as the number of likes and comments for each impression.
Eldon spoke with BrandGlue.com's Jeff Widman , who is one of the admins that has so far been able to access this information (doing work for a site called Mint.com), and he says he is able to check things like how much the news feed algorithm weights individual items versus the fan page itself. He also says Pages are seeing "many more" impressions than fans. Eldon writes (and shows screenshots):
With Mint's Page, for example, it has around 45,000 fans but a single post has more than 53,000 impressions. The 8,000 difference could be fans coming from the Page wall instead of their news feeds. But “it’s also a little uncertain where those 8,000 extra visits are coming from," Widman adds, "as the Insights package shows less than half the 8K page visits since that post appeared. Perhaps it’s counting each time someone sees the News Feed? So multiple Facebook visits in a single day appear as multiple impressions?"
Facebook Pages have become an increasingly great way for businesses and web sites to generate traffic as well as customer engagement. Facebook also recently launched it's answer to Twitter's retweet, which means that content pushed through pages have a much better shot at being shared more frequently throughout the social network (which is much larger than Twitter I might add).
In other Facebook news, the company is getting into customized data centers and is now letting application users get notifications through email. This means developers can seek out your email address on an opt-in basis (not much differently than a web site would do).
Great question. How does a domain name affect your Search Engine rankings? What actually contributes to the value of a domain name? Let's take a look. 1. Type-in Traffic Years ago, many people didn't understand the difference between the URL (Uniform Resource Locater) or address of the actual website and the search window in Google. One goes directly to a particular website, like the address of a house. The other is an actual search. So people would just type in what they were looking for in the *address* field...i.e. "new shoes". This is called type-in traffic. This meant that if you were lucky enough to buy a domain like "newshoes.com" for around $7.00 per year, you would automatically receive a respectable amount of traffic to that domain...type-in traffic. This would make the domain valuable, as it could be parked or used for an ecommerce shoe store...traffic equals money.
It is 2010 now, people are more savvy. More people use the search window and they know that it is a search window. So, type-in traffic has diminished, not to mention that everyone is hip to domain ownership, any ones with any value have been bought up. Goddaddy.com even buys domains they feel will have high traffic and resells them to you and me at a premium price, this is a premium domain. By the way, they will quickly settle for 70% of the asking price if asked. Type-in traffic isn't what it used to be and domains are more expensive.
Does it matter? The short answer is "not much". Content is still king. Google works very hard to return relevant, high-quality results for it visitors. Look at facebook.com, google.com, yahoo.com, the domain can be anything. Can it help? Absolutely. If your domain contains your keywords you will get a little more love from Google and the search engines, but will it make or break your website? No. Shorter is better, descriptive is better. I recommend considering buying a premium domain, it is a good start.
Domain name traffic Listen, I have owned a lot of domains, upwards of 450 at one point. I have purchased premium domains, acted as a domain broker for my clients, parked domains at different domain parking services like sedo.com, parked.com and many others. I have struggled to optimize over 150 landing pages in an effort to make a passive income...all with not much success, except learning a lot about how domains work. Look, there are many ways to measure traffic. All of my websites are built on a CMS and it has it's own traffic stats. Well, I also use Google Analytics on all my sites. When I compare the numbers from both, they are different. There is no way to tell who is linking to your site, conclusively. There is no way to be 100% accurate on where the traffic is coming from. I have been a victim of a scam where you "purchase traffic". The company explained that they had high-traffic websites...that were relevant...that you would get links from and traffic to your site. I found that that was not the case. Technically, I got traffic, but who knows where it came from. With all the traffic, I got not new customers and a very high bounce rate. The bottom line is: Don't believe traffic reports, unless you are using Google Analytics and have personal access to the live Google Analytics account.
Old domains One cool thing you can do is to check out archive.org. This site will let you see what a website looked like years ago. It will show you if there was a website associated with the domain you are looking at. If you want to see what your competitor's site looked like back in '08 you can check it out. With old domains, you want to be careful. You want to know what kind of site it was, you don't want to do a lot of back paddling in the first few months of your new domain/website ownership. Type in "link:www.yournewdomainname.com" in Google, and it will show you how many links point to that domain, same thing using Yahoo!, I use both.
Summary Who is the best company to buy a domain from? Godaddy.com. A short domain is better, easy to spell, easy to remember. Remember, you may be giving your domain name address over the phone. It is ok to spend money on a domain, but be careful, negotiate, grind the dude down. If you want to know how drop me a line.
The most valuable thing online is original content. How is original content created? It begins with either original thought or an original perspective on existing content.
The problem with original thought is, although it is probably very common, it must be expressed to be shared. It can only be expressed either verbally or in writing. Both are different skill sets. For the Web, writing is writing and verbal can be either audio or video w/audio. Writing is more work and all require a separate talent.
So it is easier to proceed in sections. ID the original thought, organize it and decide how it should be expressed. Work on the expression until it matches the thought as closely as possible.
That is how to get great content which will eventuate into great traffic for your Facebook page or anything online.
The overwhelming majority of people who provide content for the Web have the original thoughts, but they are never conveyed online. There seems to be an invisible border.
Out of everything I do to drive traffic to a website, how it is built, keyword research, site optimization, advertising...everything...it all can be replaced with consistent, regular original content.
So why is there so much mediocre content on the Web? Google referred to it as a "cesspool" a few months ago. It is because of two primary reasons. 1. People don't realize what they are sharing, there is a formality to it that people new to the Web bring; that is not necessary. We forget how far we have come and how quickly. Adding content to the Web is actually publishing something. Prior to the Web getting published was a big deal. The second thing is that providing quality content is actual work.
With Mint's Page, for example, it has around 45,000 fans but a single post has more than 53,000 impressions. The 8,000 difference could be fans coming from the Page wall instead of their news feeds. But “it’s also a little uncertain where those 8,000 extra visits are coming from," Widman adds, "as the Insights package shows less than half the 8K page visits since that post appeared. Perhaps it’s counting each time someone sees the News Feed? So multiple Facebook visits in a single day appear as multiple impressions?"