Client: “OK, so my main site is doing well. We’ve got a bunch of links, some age on the domain name, a decent pagerank, and a couple hundred indexed pages. But the domain name itself doesn’t have our main keyword(s) in it. And I see a bunch of the highest rank websites have the equivalent of a “vanity URL”… it’s chock full of keywords. So what do we do?”
SEO: “Well gee, it depends” (aka: The SEO’s Standard Response)
It’s a question that all of us SEO’s have had to answer at one time or another. And there isn’t a whole lot of agreement across the board (so I invite anyone with expert experience in this department to chime in below in the comments section.) Until we have a tested answer to the question, I’ll wildly speculate on the best approach.
The Problem: Let’s re-phrase the question with an example to make sure we are all on the same page:
Let’s say Ying’s Teahouse and Yum Yum is trying to rank for “Columbus Chinese Food.” And Ying bought www.yingsteahouseandyumyum.com when she started the business 5 years ago and has added a bit of content slowly over the last five years. The domain is five years old and is getting steady traffic and has picked up some decent links along the way.
But now Ying is thinking that maybe buying www.columbuschinesefood.com will get her higher in the rankings. And to boot, she also bought up clintonvillechinesefood.com, centralohiochinesefood.com, ohiosbestchinesefood.com, and a handful of other keyword rich domains. So what do we do now?
My Opinion: Google’s search algo. is constantly searching for a balance in the importance of keywords in the domain name. About a year ago, domain name keywords didn’t have a whole lot of importance, but lately there seems to be a good deal more importance placed on the keywords in the domain. Who knows where it will be in 6 months? [click to continue…]
This is a follow-up to my last post that was a rant on all of those “Get More Traffic Today!” advertisements you see out there. (You can see that post here: Get Less Traffic Now!).
What I’m going to explain is that what you really want is more targeted traffic. Now, sometimes when you work toward more targeted traffic, you get discouraged because you are getting less traffic. You start to think that you are doing something wrong, and then all of the sudden you realize that your bottom line just tripled.
We all get caught up in the traffic fever at one time or another. We post a comment on a comment board and get 200 hits that day and think: “If I could just do that everyday, I’d be rich!”. Well, the problem is that not all traffic is created equal. Getting 200 targeted prospects from a mention in an industry magazine is totally different than getting 200 browsers coming by your site because they liked your comment on how great Quantum Leap was as a show. But when your analytics software tells you that you got 400 hits that day, all because of a comment, you can forget simple principles like that.
One of my most profitable investment websites is Fulltimer Blog. This site is for people who live Fulltime in an RV and travel around. This is a very small group of people, and the site has little pizzazz. It consistently brings in money, every month, despite what I do. The traffic to this site is a trickle… usually only 10-15 people a day. When I first started working with this site, I tried a bunch of methods to get traffic to the site… sometimes bringing in 100 people a day, sometimes 20, sometimes 300. But, over time, I realized the the same number of products sold either way. The same 2 or 3 people that came to the site were interested in buying an ebook or membership. They were the right traffic I was after. Everybody else was just wasting their time, because they weren’t interested in what the website sold, so I stopped working to get those hits.
I remembered that it was my bottom line that I wanted to see improve, not nessesarily the number of hits on my site or the number of subscribers to my email.
In the next post, I’ll explain how to start finding your right traffic by doing keyword research. Keyword research is just going through the Google database to find out what your searchers type in to find what you offer. There is usually a pretty big disconnect between the words you use to describe what you have, and the words your clients use to ask for what you have. Bridging that gap is what Keyword Research is all about.
And remember that if this interests you, you can always contact me for Internet Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, and a myriad of other Web services. If you live in or around Columbus, Ohio, we can sit down for a face-to-face. How many people can offer that?
-Brad
My name is Brad and I love to help people drive traffic and make great blogs. Thanks for coming by. If you like what you see here then check me out on 
