Domain Names–What To Consider When Choosing One
May 28, 2006
Domain Names–What To Consider When Choosing One
By Ba Kiwanuka
Never register your domain name through your web hosting company however attractive the deal might appear. Why? Well one day you may wish to transfer your domain name to another web hosting provider and your current web host may not take kindly to this. It is not unusual in such cases for the web host to charge a transfer fee and even in extreme cases to unequivocally refuse the transfer of your domain name. If such a situation arises you can report the offending party to the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
Another thing to consider when registering your domain name is not to rely solely on your domain name register to ensure that the domain name you have in mind is available and does not infringe on someone else’s trademark rights (unless you enjoy being sued). To be doubly sure your domain name has no trademark infringement issues, after conducting a search for its availability on your domain name register’s website, you can also check at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) http://www.uspto.gov.
When registering your domain name it’s a good idea to register it for more than one year. The reason being that, other than the usual discounts you get for multi-year registrations from most domain name registers, Google (and perhaps the other search engines) consider multi-year registered domains as less likely to be spam sites. Consequently, right off the bat your site will have a search engine advantage (at least with Google), such as a shorter evaluation period in the Google Sandbox.
A final note about domain name registration; there are plenty of domain name registration companies out there, all eager and equally willing to register your new name. Domain name registration prices range from as little as $10 a year up to $35 per year and beyond. Generally there is little point in opting for the more expensive registers because you more or less get the same service. In fact some of the cheaper domain name registration companies provide better quality service.
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Best Blogging Software
March 29, 2006
Best Blogging Software by Miles Evans
The blogging platform wars are getting really interesting and much of the discussion I find myself in lately revolves around what is happening with various CMS systems. The market can essentially be defined into 3 major camps: remotely hosted, self hosted, and community based systems. I have used pretty much every blogging platform available and each of them has its ups and downs. In this article I will cover the best options for each area taking into account price, usability, market share and of course SEO potential.
All of these products are either open source, completely free or have a functional free version. Links were stripped from this article so you may want to check out the original best blogging software article at ProfitPapers.
Remotely Hosted Blogging Software (Note: I cannot really recommend any of these from an SEO stand point as optimizing a domain you do not own or control is obviously not a good marketing plan.)
Blogger is completely free and currently owns the majority of the remotely hosted user base, but not by a land slide . Bought out by Google in 1999, Blogger essentially fired up the blogging trend we see today. It is by far the easiest overall solution to use and if you are a novice user looking to throw up some recipes or poetry, this is for you. Blogger is completely free and includes some great features like comments, photo blogging, and a basic community feel with user profiles. Because it is so dumbed down there are some features you may not find with Blogger that are only available through 3rd party add-ons. As a side note Blogger weblogs do quite well in the search engines and this was recently exploited with it being the first choice for spam blogs or splogs. A splog is a weblog used for the sole purpose of gaining inbound links or generating thousands of keyword stuffed pages with Adsense and the like. The recent Google Jagger update cleared a large portion of this up. Free.
Understanding Inbound Links and their Benefits
March 15, 2006
by Brian Gilley
Link building has arguably been the most important factor and one of the core focus areas for most companies and webmasters wanting to improve their rankings within search engines. It’s no secret that every major search engine heavily weighs inbound links for their search results, including natural occurrences of those links, anchor text being used within their search results, and quantity or quality of those links.
Within this article, I’ll explain exactly what you need to do to successfully market a page or pages within your web site and achieve a good balance of quality inbound links. For simplicity, I will discuss anchor text variations, most effective text to use within links, and where links should be acquired, i.e. directories, blogs, or other niche sites.
The first concept to grasp is that there are many types of links that can be targeted, not just an anchor text link with two or three words to a particular page of your site. Let’s start with the following three types:
1) URL or Web Page Links
- these links are directed to a URL of a web site. This type of link to a specific page does increase the general authority of that particular page and is beneficial to use to increase the natural occurrences of inbound links to a web site.
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Feed Your Blog With Google Alerts to Save Time and Energy
March 3, 2006
by Brandon Cornett
Blog(s) need food!
That might sound like the climactic speech from a caveman movie, but it’s actually a hard truth of blogging. Business and marketing blogs need quality content on a regular basis in order to attract readers and search engines. In other words, you must feed your blog regularly if you expect it to grow. The challenge is coming up with quality content on a daily or weekly basis.
Here’s one solution:
Robotic Research Assistant
Imagine having your own Web-crawling robot, surfing the Internet 24/7 to find relevant information you can use in your blog. Think of the time you would save, having this content delivered to your inbox every day. How much would a robot like that be worth?
Would free work for you?
Five Common Myths About Search Engine Optimization
January 13, 2006
Picture this scene, an adolescent boy walks into a barber shop and says to the barber, “Don’t touch me, I’m only here because my mom forced me.” Search engine optimizers are sometimes put into the position of the barber. They are knowledgeable and willing to work on their client’s site, but the client doesn’t want any modifications done to the text that is visible on her web pages. This kind of dilemma occurs due to general misconceptions about search engine optimization. Let’s look at these misconceptions.
1. SEO only involves writing meta tags and working on “invisible” code
Many people want to get a high ranking for various keywords or keyword phrases, but if you look at the text on their web pages you can hardly find these vital words. They come to a search engine optimizer and think that he or she will sprinkle these words into the meta tags and it will work like magic. This is a major misunderstanding.
It is true that your main keywords and key phrases should be in your title tag and your description meta tag, and even in the keywords meta tag, but they must also appear on the page itself and they must appear in some strategic places on that page. Some clients say, “But I like the way it looks now.” You may like the way it looks, but the search engines will not recognize that your page is truly about Electronic Widgets unless these words appear in headlines on the page, in the opening paragraph, in the file or domain name in link text and in the body text of your page.
So, by all means if you already have copy that works, that can convert visitors into buyers or otherwise accomplish the purposes of your site, keep it. But you should also be ready to listen to what the optimizer has to say about modifications that will enable search engines to select your site when a potential buyer makes a query for your key words or phrases.
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