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Mar 25th

Buy a Keyword Happy Domain Name

written by: Lee Johnson

There are various reasons why a web address needs to be right – and right from the very start of your websites life. The first thing that should be considered when choosing a web address is the marketability of the address, will it stick in peoples mind? Many online companies now don’t use the typical names associated with a company and prefer to go for terms such as “blue-widgets.com”. This is largely due to the fact that domain names are more effective if they have a keyword within them (i use lee-johnson.com, I want to be found for my own name)).

Make it keyword rich

By choosing a keyword rich domain name you are further emphasising the relevance of your website to that term. Although this is not as effective today as it has been in past years, it is still worth getting right. As well as the beneficial effects a keyword rich domain has on your search engine rankings, it also has an effect on your sites “click through”. If a search engine user sees a domain name which matches their search then it is more attractive than a domain which is more generic.

Make the domain name easy to remember

When building your site you should also think about web addresses which are simple and easy for your visitors to remember. Rather than having long complicated URLs with query strings and many sub folders you should keep URLs short, to the point and keyword rich.

image of: google results page for the search term lee johnson (position no2)

Lee-Johnson Domain testing

I have been studying how a domain name (website address) can help assist in getting good search engine results page positioning for the keyword rich domain. As you can see by the above image I have been getting great results for my name “Lee Johnson”. As we all know both “Lee” and “Johnson” are very common names which makes the above result even more amazing. It does fluctuate a little in the results (which is quite normal) but is always in the top 5 of Google results pages.

I have been doing lots of testing to see how easy it would be to get to No.1; as you can see I am nearly there. I know it is not really a keyword but I want to be found for my own name and not just keyword phrases. There are many examples of keyword rich website addresses that rank well on the SERP’s, they help the smaller online business that don’t have a brand, it all help’s. ToysRus recently bought the domain toys.com for 2.1 million dollars, in time it will help them achieve more natural traffic; it’s easy to remember too.

Conclusion

When considering purchasing a domain; make it keyword rich, short and easy to remember, if you want it to be a keyword phrase: REMEMBER: no more than 3 words and use hyphens between the words (e.g. lee-johnson.com). This artilce is also to test if I can get this article found for the term Lee Johnson and also for the new snippet search engine results pages.

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Mar 22nd

Duplicate Home Pages – Canonicalization

written by: Lee Johnson

Site Construction – The Problem

When building a site there are certain SEO fundamentals that web designers often miss. This is understandable as search engines aren’t their specialist area; although many web designers now have a basic knowledge of SEO and know how to build a site that is search engine friendly.

One of the key SEO mistakes which designers miss is the creation of several home pages due to site navigation. The problem occurs due to the way search engines view sites, or more appropriately the way search engines view URLs. You see, although there is only one index (home) page on a server when that page is delivered to the end user it can appear in the address bar in a variety of different ways:

http://www.yourdomain.com

http://www.yourdomain.com/index.htm

http://yourdomain.com

http://yourdomain.com/index.htm

Each one of these URLs will pull the same file (index.htm) from the server. This is obvious to us, but to the search engines a different URL means a different page and it treats all four as independent pages from each other. This causes various problems with PageRank, duplicate content and spidering.

The Solution

There are various ways which we can solve this problem and all are very easy to setup. What we need to do is tell the server to always produce the correct URL no matter what is requested. We do this by using 301 redirects, htaccess and mod_rewrite’s.

You don’t need to be a programmer to do this, simply add the code below to your .htaccess file.

To redirect non www URLs to include the www use:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^ yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

To redirect yourdomain.com/index.htm to yourdomain.com/ use:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule ^/index\.(php|html)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/ [R=301, L]
RewriteRule ^(.*)/index\.(php|html)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1/ [R=301, L]

Any internal site links and any external inbound links will now seamlessly redirect to one URL. This solves the problem but the lesson is… make sure the site is built correctly from the start!

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Feb 26th

SEO Best Practices

written by: Lee Johnson

There are a number of techniques that can be used to ensure your site is indexed and well positioned in the major search engines. While SEO techniques are changing constantly, the following are currently considered important for good positioning:

Keyword Research

The phrases you think your target market might be searching for may very well be incorrect. A great tool for finding out suitable keywords is Google Adwords Keywords Tool – https://adwords.google.com. This will also allow you to look at other websites and find out what keywords they are using and Google is finding.

WebSite Copywriting

Web page copy is of major importance for search engines, directories, and customers. Search engine spiders (also known as robots) need machine-readable content (text) and HTML tags to index web sites.

Short, clear and concise paragraphs will aid both visitor and search engines. Write for people first and search engines second. Human visitors need clear, easy-to-understand content and navigation on your pages; search engine robots need that same kind of clarity.
This article will be added too soon so come back for more.

Site Structure

For instance, let’s say your site sells toys. There are numerous ways you could categorize and lay out your site so that people will find the toys they’re looking for. Are people looking for toys to fit their child’s stage of development? (Look for keyword phrases such as “preschool toys.”) Or are they more likely to be seeking specific brands of toys?

Most likely, your keyword research will show you that people are looking for toys in many different ways. Your job is to make sure that your site’s navigation showcases the various ways of searching. Make sure you have links to specific-brand pages as well as specific age ranges, specific types of toys, etc.

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Feb 26th

Latent Semantic Indexing Made Easy

written by: Lee Johnson

Semantic Indexing (or LSI) instantly sounds complicated, from a technical point of view it probably is, but when you break it down and understand WHY search engines are using this technique it makes much more sense.

The basic principal

The basic principal is to bring the best, most relevant results to the end user and is much like writing semantically, except that you write around a theme rather than a specific word or phrase. The idea is to determine other things that your site or page is about so that when the page is indexed more accurate results based on the search can be shown.

The content you write for search engine optimisation purposes is often based around a specific keyword or phrase, but by writing about the same thing, in the same term over and over again you stand to loose some serious rankings.

If you were to write a page about a computer, chances are you are naturally going to use other terms relating to this such as ‘hardware, ‘PC’ or ‘software’.

When this page is spidered by search engines these related terms can be picked up and a link between computer, hardware, PC and software can be made, much like human would – If you were to find a page on computers but it contained irrelevant information or spam you wouldn’t read it, search engines are similar, except they wouldn’t rank it as highly in the results because it contains the irrelevant information that is not benefiting the end user.

Rankings for pages

Rankings for pages that use related terms or ‘themes’ tend to rank higher on search engines than pages that focus specifically on one keyword or phrase. If your page has a good mix of specific key phrase combined with a range of related terms the results tend to be stable.

Conclusion

When writing content don’t overuse the same term too many times on a page. Use relevant words that associate with the keyword phrase that you are looking to be found for. Your content will read far better and be more interesting too. Happy writing…!

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