How To Pick The Best Domain Name

Picking the best domain name for your blog is one of the most crucial steps towards building your blog’s brand. A professional domain name helps you build credibility amongst your prospective reader base and also helps you set the right first impression. You also have the ability to create personalized email addresses that will be formatted to look like “your_name@domain_name.com”, this gives you greater credibility compared to free email services such as gmail.com and ymail.com.

.com dominates the world of domain extensions.

A Domain name is an extremely vital component of your blog’s identity, which is the reason you should put in some serious thought in picking one that can be associated with your niche, and more importantly reflects your blog’s identity. Although there is no fixed set of rules to help you make the right choice, a few pointers can help you make a better choice.

• Your domain name should complement your brand: You should pick a domain name which would effectively convey your brand sentiments. Your domain name should complement your niche.
• Your domain name should be unique and gets you noticed: An eye-catching and simple domain name can get your blog attention. You should avoid using hyphens or words that can easily be misspelled. Domain names having a shorter length should be preferred since it is easier to type and memorize them.
• Your domain name should be able to get you free traffic: A relevant domain name can get you exposure through search engines since their algorithms favor descriptive domain names. Domain names, which contain keywords used to search content belonging to your blog’s niche, have a better chance of being ranked higher in the search engine results and in the process get you free relevant traffic. Free traffic that is directly searching for what you have to offer is always the best kind of traffic. A great way to find the right name for your niche is you use the Google Keyword Tool , with this you can explore the most trafficked words or phrase in your niche for your site name; you may even find phrases that you didn’t expect that may bring in much more traffic than your original keyword choice.
• Your domain name should have the right extension: There is a plethora of options available when it comes to selecting a domain extension including but not limited to .com, .org, .net, .info, and an entire host of country specific extensions. If possible, go for a .com extension since users have the tendency to use “.com” by default. If the .com is not available it is best to go with the .net and the .org extension. Also more recently non-traditional domain names have been in vogue, these extensions have been creatively used to craft out names, one notable example being Visual.ly, but unless you can create an eye catching brandable name like that, the non-traditional country specific url extensions should be avoided.
As soon as you have zeroed in on a domain name of your choice you should get it registered by any of the domain registrars online. There are a lot of great services that can help you book a domain name of your choice; there is also an option of booking your domain name with multiple extensions, this way you own the brand. For instance we here at BlogTipsandTricks.com also own BlogTipsnadTricks.net and .org and have both of the redirected to our .com site.
In a future article we will walk you through the best domain registrars who can help you book a domain name that will fit your niche to a tee, and we will be including a bonus way to get the absolute best price for any domain. Including the very best way to always get your .com domain names for only $.99.
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Tag : SEO

How To Grow Your Online Presence By Copying Your Competitors

We here at BlogTipsandTricks.com are glad to bring to you our newest guest poster Adam with Digivate.com. He’s an expert in online business and has a lot to bring to the blogging community… Take it away Adam…
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In business the theory is pretty simple; if you are, in some way, better than your competition, you should win some custom… Obviously there’s more to it than that, but basically you have to out compete your competition.

In the old-days, this meant being higher quality, cheaper or faster etc…
 

But when it comes to online marketing, whether you are running a business or growing a blog it is often simply a case of having a better, more visible, more usable website.

Essentially, if you are easier to find than your competition,
that can be a large part of the battle
 

Copying But Improving

Of course, there is one simple way to be better than your competition; copy them and then improve upon that blueprint.

Over 97% of the value of an innovation will go to imitators… Imitate but improve.

This is a surprisingly under-utilized strategy in the online world, but there really are plenty of ways to track your competition and learn from them. Here are just a few:
Building The Best Links
Need links for your SEO campaign? Of course you do. Building quality links is a vital part of SEO, which is a vital part of making your blog / website more visible to your potential customers.
Don’t limit your view of who your competitors actually are though. In SEO terms, your biggest competition is the website that is ranking for the term you want to rank for. So rather than blindly building links, have a look at how your competition is doing it.
One easy strategy is to use opensiteexplorer.org. Get a list of your competitor’s backlinks; in particular you want to download a list of linking domains:

This is (mostly) all of the websites that are linking to that competitor

Now head over to linkdetective.com to analyze those links. This will give you a handy breakdown of what types of sites are linking in

• Blogs
• News sites
• Article directories
• etc…

Once you have your list, you can filter out the low quality sites and then go and attempt to get links from the best sites.
Building The Best Content
They say content is king – which is pretty cliché and grossly overused, but never-the-less, if your web pages don’t actually deserve to rank for your target keywords then you have an uphill struggle on your hands.
Again, Google the phrase you want to target and check out the pages that are already at the top. Look for ideas; what information are they giving away, what handy tools do they have and what are they missing.
Now run the same analysis on your own page. Page title’s and meta tags are important, but not as important as the actual quality of the page, so ask yourself whether your page is honestly better than your competitors’ pages.
Social Media Strategy
Now try having a look at your competitors who are selling similar products to you. Start by having a look around on their site to see if they are using any social media:

• Do they have a Twitter account?
• Are they on Facebook?
• Do they have a blog and if so, is it active?

Try not to dwell too much on what a specific competitor is doing. It is more helpful to look at which platforms appear to be most popular within your niche. If you notice that Twitter is barely being used, that may be a sign that it is not particularly profitable. Alternatively, maybe it is being used, but no-one seems to have much of a following.
Of course, it could also be a sign that there is a gap in your market, for someone who can use Twitter successfully – in which case, ask yourself whether you are the one who can do so.
Any time you see a competitor failing to use a platform effectively, ask yourself what they are doing wrong. And if you see a competitor with a very large following, take tips from them and try to emulate their formula.
Summary
The reality, you’ll soon realize, is that the internet makes business much more transparent. It is strange that so few businesses use this to their advantage, but by becoming an effective internet detective, you can always keep one step ahead – and your competition will be left wondering how you’re doing it!
About The Author
If you want more information about internet marketing, please check out the Digivate blog. My name is Adam by the way – I work at Digivate. Here’s a recent post from our blog about online vs traditional media marketing.

Tag : SEO

Everything you ever wanted to know about SEO- Keywords

In the last article we discussed about what SEO is, why we need to know about it and how is a blog ranked on search engines. This article will walk you through the various ways through which you can optimize your blog for search engines.
The algorithms that search engines employ to rank websites are not public knowledge but in spite of it the factors that influence your blog’s rank are common knowledge. We will discuss about some of the most important factors that can help you optimize your blog for search engines.
Keywords: This is one of the most important aspects of search engine optimization. Keywords are the typed queries on the search engine that return your blog in the search results.

Having the correct keywords can make or break a blog.

Before optimizing your blog for keywords the first thing that needs to be done is to find out the right keywords you should target. The chosen keywords should complement your blog’s niche. Once you have decided on a list of target keywords make sure that there is a significant density of these keywords on your blog to get the search engines interested. The positioning of keywords is important, too, for example the presence of keywords at specific places like the title, sub titles, and URL carry more weight compared to a keyword appearing in the content. You should abstain from stuffing your blog with keywords just for the sake of a higher keyword density, keywords must be used judiciously, and also the search engines will penalize your site if you have too many keywords compared to the total amount of words. Having only one to two and a half percent of your words being key words or long tail-keywords is considered optimal.
Note: long-tail keywords can be entire phrases rather than specific words, for instance if you are looking to sell Facebook followers through your blog or site, instead of targeting the key word “Facebook”, you may look to target, the long-tail keyword “cheap Facebook followers”. Long-tail keywords are usually easier to rank for than just the base word itself.
We will dedicate an entire article to help you optimize your blog with the right keywords. Market Samurai is a great tool, which can help you optimize your site with the right keywords. We will discuss about the tool in more detail in one of our future posts.
Link building: A link from an external website to your blog is called an inbound link. Search engines, especially Google assign a lot of significance to inbound links. A greater number of inbound links is a sign of relevant and quality content. A link from a quality website is more significant compared to a link from a regular website. A link is considered to be of good quality if the external site has content similar to your blog and if the external site has multiple inbound links of its own. It is also possible to have links that add negative value to your site, so it is not always wise to simply buy tens of thousands of links at the lowest possible price. A few quality backlinks can have a much better affect of helping your site rank, and many thousands of poor links.
Content: It is extremely critical that your blog has original and amazing content, maintaining high-quality content will tempt bloggers from your niche to link to your blog which will result in additional inbound links and referral traffic for your blog. Spam content stuffed with keywords can adversely affect your search ranking because the search algorithms specifically filter out such content.
Custom domain and hosting: Blogs using custom domain names and hosts are more likely to appear on search results as opposed to their free counterparts, the reason being that bloggers subscribing to paid services are considered to be more serious and technically literate compared to bloggers using free platforms like Blogger.com and WordPress.com. In a lot of cases the paid hosts provide premium services, which include search engine optimization by SEO experts. Therefore it is often recommended that you go for custom domain and paid hosting.
Optimization: You can technically enhance your sites so that search engines are more receptive to your site.
Meta tags: These are HTML code snippets that are not visible to humans but are used by search engine crawlers to extract information like the description of the blog and the keywords it has been optimized for.
Site maps: this is an XML file consisting of a map of your site complete with URLs, which are provided to the crawlers so that they can intelligently crawl your site, in the best way possible.
Clean Codes: Search engines prefer blogs that are efficiently coded, have quick loading times, and no broken links.
All of the above mentioned factors, if implemented correctly, could greatly enhance your blogs ability to be ranked higher in the search engines. However one important point to note is that you should never abuse any of the above-mentioned techniques by over doing them because the search engines will often interpret this as keyword stuffing or spam

Tag : SEO

4 Questions You Must Ask Your Potential SEO Company

If you’re thinking about boosting your online presence and using the internet to bring new customers to your business, you’ve probably considered using the services of an SEO company. Whilst this is a great option if you don’t have the time or the expertise in-house, it’s essential that you pick the provider very carefully. There are many excellent companies out there, but there also ones that engage in black-hat tactics and can do your business more bad than good.
Here, we look at the four questions that you should be asking before making your decision.
‘What results have you achieved in the past?’
A professional SEO company, will be able to provide you with the details of how they’ve helped other businesses in the past. A good track record is essential and proves that they’re worth working with. Rather than just asking about improved rankings, make sure that you ask about how their efforts boosted sales and impacted the bottom line. While your position in Google is important, it’s essentially just a means to an end. If it isn’t translating into new business, it’s not worth your investment.
‘What tactics do you use to boost rankings?’
You don’t have to be an expert in SEO, but it’s always a good idea to know what tactics your provider will use. Good companies will be open and transparent about how they work, and will be happy to talk you through their processes.
‘What do you think about black-hat SEO?’
Black-hat SEO is all about flouting Google’s guidelines to win quick rankings. It sometimes works in the short term, but it can seriously damage your business in the long term, and is never the approach that you should be using. Of course, you need to find a company with a dedication to using approved and ethical methods. As algorithms and rules change all of the time, make sure that you also ask about how they make sure their practices are kept up to date.
‘How will I pay for your services?’
SEO can be costly, but it can also have a massive return on investment. Always make sure that you fully understand how the payment system works and what you can expect for your money. In this respect, pay on results services are a fantastic option. You’ll only part with your money once the company has proved that they can have a positive impact on your rankings, taking away any of the risk and associated worry.
By asking these questions to several SEO companies, you should be able to get a good feel for how they work and whether you should consider working for them. All reputable businesses will be more than happy to answer all of these, and will give you all the information you need to make an informed decision.
This article was brought to you by Ruth Richards on behalf of WebSearch SEO. WebSearch SEO offers link building and other SEO services for businesses that want to get ahead online.

Tag : SEO