Which is more important? Should you have a keyword related domain name, or a personal domain name that reflects your name? This is a choice you have to make and one that depends on what your intentions are with your site.

One of the toughest questions that I faced when I started this site was what should I name it? When I first started this site, my intentions were to use it for a web design business. I enjoyed sharing what I was learning about accessible web design, and showcasing my work. Over time, however, I began realizing that there were numerous opportunities to learn a lot more about the internet and web sites, making money online and other things with personal web sites that just solidified my choice.

I decided to pick this name, ejcross.com as a personal site. This gives me a huge benefit, but also a huge drawback when it comes to domain names. Let me explain.

If you are looking to learn to blog, one of the choices you will have to make is will you sell your blog down the road? If you pick a hot topic and bring in a huge audience from your favorite topic, will you eventually sell your site? If it is in your name, probably not. If you do, you won’t make as much as you would if your site was in a generic name. Why?

Well, if I was shopping for a site that talked about my favorite items of “blue widgets” and your site was named “bobsbluewidgets.com” instead of “bestbluewidgets.com”, which one would make more sense? As for an investor or a person that was wanting to make money online with websites, I would pick the generic site name as a purchase.

When you create a site in your personal name, there comes an aspect with it that is related to you. It is hard to distinguish between you (the original owner) and someone else that might own the site. Would you want someone else owning your identity online? I sure wouldn’t.

One of the great sites that I read often when it comes to creating websites is Court’s Internet Marketing Site. You can see a great video about how to chose a domain name for beginners that should help you pick a domain name for yourself.

The ultimate choice comes down to the fact of if you want to just have a site that is related to your personal name, one that reflects your own feelings, opinions and thoughts, or if you want a site that is branded to eventually be able to sell for a profit if you decide to?

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I’m pleased to announce that you can now purchase the much talked about and anticipated Niche Store Writer software! I can tell you that this software is simply amazing!

If you haven’t seen my previous post about the Niche Store Writer to create content quickly and easily for your BANS sites, you need to read it! This software will speed up the development of your BANS sites, improve your keywords while providing great and unique content.

Head on over and get your copy of Niche Store Writer and let me know what you think!

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I’m sure you have heard of Squidoo by now, but if you haven’t, here is a quick summary.

Squidoo is like Blogger or Wordpress.com in the way of you can create a “site” for free with them. Squidoo’s sites are just a single page that you can put content on. You can make this page, called a lens, on whatever topic you would like.

You can also have as many lenses as you would like too!

Now, this might sound like a lot of extra work, however it just takes signing up (for free) and then about 3 or 4 steps and your lens is ready for you. All you have to do is add the content that you want in a text module, or you can add items from eBay or Amazon.com to your lens also.

There are polls, easily put in YouTube videos and more that you can put into your lens.

The great SEO part to Squidoo is that it is crawled heavily by the search engines and it has authority. Now, I’m not saying that you can go and make a Squidoo lens about Viagra or Cheap Car Insurance and have it ranked #1 within a few hours. It has authority, but not that kind of authority.

The best part of Squidoo is if you are targeting long tail keywords as part of your marketing or niche sites, you can easily get Squidoo to rank very well for them.

Squidoo is really powerful when it comes to the possibilities that you have to you for creating your lenses. People even use Squidoo for numerous things, like the Asia’h Epperson Fan Club, or to talk about Bloated Stomach Relief or important topics on Kitchen Fire Safety.

There are numerous ways to use Squidoo, so if you aren’t using it, then you need to sign up for Squidoo and start making lenses!

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While Asia’h Epperson was awaiting her audition for American Idol, she called her father, who couldn’t make the trip. They spoke for a short time, and Asia’h told her dad how much she wanted him to be there.

Just a short time later, prior to her audition, her brother called Asia’h to let her know that her father had been killed in an auto accident.

Asia’h decided to go on with her audition and through the raw emotion of losing her father, she sang “How do I Live” by LeAnn Rimes.

Watch this video to see the full audition promo for Asia’h Epperson from American Idol.

Visit these other great blogs about Asia’h Epperson and a great Squidoo lens, also all about Asia’h Epperson.

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So if you optimize your site like an Adwords campaign, then you should be able to increase your site traffic quite dramatically.

Most bloggers are familiar with Google Adsense. The ad program from Google displays ads on your site that are relevant to the content of your post, or site. But, how does that relate to Adwords?

Google Adwords is the component that advertisers and businesses use to create the ads that appear on your site. There is usually a lot of research that goes into the process of writing an ad for Adwords.

First, there is the keyword research. What are people searching for as it relates to your site? If your site sells “blue square widgets”, then are people finding your site by searching for widgets or by some other term?

Secondly, what is the competition using to get traffic to their site in their ads? Are they saying that they have the best blue square widgets, or are they using some other terms?

What I am getting at here is a little different than something you might be thinking about as it relates to Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

It’s in the words, stupid!

That’s right! When someone searches for a term or phrase on Google, most people just enter the term or phrase, without the quotation marks. So, if someone searches for blue square widgets without the quotes, Google will return any site that has the terms blue, square or em>widgets.

This isn’t bad if your site is optimized for all three terms and Google sees it as such. This is called the “broad search” match in Adwords. Now, since most people don’t know to narrow down their Google searches by enclosing the phrase or key terms in quotation marks, you really need to optimize to the broad match of Google.

If you want to see a real example, just do a search for something without the quotes, and write down the number of results.

But, there is the phrase match in Google also. This is the search that you can do where the term or phrase is enclosed in “quotes” and your results are more specific to the terms you are looking for. This is where Google looks at the terms as a phrase, not individual words. So, if you have those “blue square widgets”, Google will send traffic to your site for anything that has those terms in it.

An example would be if someone is searching for “blue widgets” or “square widgets” you have both in your site.

So, if you are targeting long tail keywords in your site then you really need to stick to the phrase of keywords you are using. This is critical, amongst several other areas of optimization, to let Google know that this phrase is what people searching for it really want.

Closely related to the phrase is the “exact” match, which means that will return the exact phrase searched for. You will also want to optimize for this. If you are trying to sell those damn “blue square widgets” and empty out your warehouse, then you need to not only use “blue square widgets” in your site, but any other phrases that you know of that people are searching for.

In conclusion

If you’re not familiar with Google Adsense, you should read up on how it works. I have learned a lot of information and gained some ideas on how to continue to optimize my sites, especially my niche sites, for the keywords that people are searching for. Plus, if you are using Adsense on your site, it will only help Google to return the most relevant ads to your content, thereby increasing your CTR payout hopefully.

What are your experiences with Adsense and Adwords?

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Now, when I first read about it, I was thinking it was a free 15 day trial offer, or something like that. It isn’t. The free version of Web CEO is free, for life!

The free version of Web CEO has lots of features broken down into the following four major categories.

Organize your Site

With this section, you can do keyword research, optimize your pages and even edit them directly from their interface. Lot’s of neat stuff to help get you started with some basics. You can set up as many sites as you wish also for all of the sections and tests that you can run and perform too. So, if you have one site, or 100 sites, this free software can take care of them for you.

Promote your Site

You can use this section to submit your site and information to search engines and directories around the world. Just fill out a little information and away it goes. You can also find link partners and set up email campaigns. Want to manage your PPC campaigns too? No problem, done.

Check your Rankings

You will be able to analyze your sites here, and check your SERP’s, check how your backlinks are doing, and from where with PR. You can also get a 15 day free trial of their traffic analyzer software package. I haven’t done this as I use Google Analytics and have been pretty happy with that so far. If you are getting tons of hits a day, maybe you would want to try it and see if it does anything special.

Maintain your Site

Web CEO has a built in FTP system, and you can also monitor your sites uptime, and control the site quality. I haven’t played around much with this section, so if you do, let me know how it works!

There are lots of other little features with this system too. I haven’t written about them as it would be a huge post. Take a look, get the free training and download the .pdf book on how things work. The .pdf book is really nice, simple instructions and layout.

Overall, for a free tool, Web CEO is pretty neat. I’m all about free, and who isn’t!

Let me know what you think of this, or do you have any other free tools you use?

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Now, BloggingZoom and BloggerUnleashed have both been hacked! If you aren’t sure what BloggingZoom is, I have written about BloggingZoom site launched, the Pros and Cons of BloggingZoom, and most recently about BloggingZoom and the Sandbox.

BloggingZoom is a really popular site and is gaining popularity for it’s powerful SEO practices that it allows, such as submitting your own sites is encouraged, and a minimum 350 character summary to allow for keyword rich summaries. BZ is run by Court Tuttle and Vic from BloggerUnleashed.

Speaking of BloggerUnleashed, just one word, WOW! If you are looking for some great truths of SEO and niche marketing, you need to be reading this site! And, while you are at it, add Internet Marketing and Services by Court and Make Money Online by Grizz also as must reads for great, and honest tips and tools for building your powerful SEO and niche sites.

Just keep checking on BZ and BU, as I promise they are worth the reads!

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It’s a pretty simple answer, and let me explain how if you aren’t using BloggingZoom as part of your SEO and site promotion products, you are missing out on something that will really pay off.

I have been using BloggingZoom now for quite sometime, almost since it began. I was a little skeptical at first, but after a few weeks, I was beginning to see results.

It takes a little effort to correctly use BZ to it’s fullest potential and let me explain this part in detail.

Social sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon and the rest will not let you submit your own sites. They don’t want you promoting your own stuff, and are only looking for “new” submissions. BZ encourages you to submit your own stuff.

What’s the benefit of doing this? Backlinks.

You see, I have a few sites that are newer domain names and they are in the sandbox right now. They were gaining ground quickly and a couple of them were on page 1 of the SERP’s for about a week or two, then “poof” they disappeared. This is common for the sandbox, your site begins to become popular with a new domain name, and then it’s gone.

Don’t panic! BloggingZoom to the rescue!

Since you have joined BZ (hint…hint…and no I’m not an affiliate) and have been submitting your sites and articles to it, there are now backlinks to your posts that are showing up in the SERP’s. Trust me, this is how I am still getting some traffic to my sandboxed sites.

But, the best part of BZ is this. When you submit your post, the minimum “summary” is 350 letters. Why is this good? Keywords.

Other sites limit how much you can put into the summary, but not BZ. This is where you keyword stuff your summary to let the search engines know what your post is about. People then find the BZ submission, read it, and now visit your site.

I just wanted to pass this along if you are looking for more ways to promote your site without getting banned or canned from Digg or other places. Now, a couple of my post submissions are on page two or three of Google for my keyword terms, and BZ is currently sandboxed. Can you imagine what will happen when it comes out itself?

Head on over to BloggingZoom and sign up!

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I can happily report that ejcross.com is now a PR5! So, what does that mean? It means that I have played by the google rules and have escaped unharmed from any concerns I had about my page rank.

Several of my others sites also went from a PR n/a to a PR3 and a few others remained the same. One of my bigger sites, BestiPodStuff.com went to a PR3 also. This is good news for me and my sites, but what is the bigger picture?

In October or so there was great weeping and anger from numerous bloggers when Google smacked down their PR. There were several high profile bloggers that went from a PR 5 or PR 6 to a PR 0 or PR 2.

By using good, solid SEO practices such as clean markup, great titles and a few other SEO methods, you can increase your PR also. But, one important thing to not be overlooked is what exactly are you doing on your blog?

I wonder if those blogs that use the “do follow” will be affected? Also, will the Google smack down on blogs that use PayPerPost and other “paid” links be affected? I’m sure we will begin to hear about it, only if this PR update is more widespread than just my blogs.

It will be interesting to see what happens this time around.

So, what happened with your PR? Did it go up or down?

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Let’s take a look at what has happened to me recently.

One of my other sites has recently seen an increase in traffic from Google. Now this is a newer site, established around October of 2007, and I haven’t had any problems with it, until recently.

I had been seeing an increase in Google search traffic on this site with around 100 or more unique visitors a day from Google searches for a couple of long tail keywords that I had targeted. I was seeing some good traffic on my affiliate links, and a decent CTR on my Adsense ads.

Until last Thursday morning. I was checking my site stats like I usually do in the morning, when I noticed that my visitor count had all but disappeared. I checked my log for what search terms were bringing me traffic, and none of my long tails were there anymore. Oh, crap! I went to Google and did a search for the long tails that had been bringing me traffic, and I was no longer on the first page!

But, since I had been using good SEO title practices and submitting the individual pages that are now no longer on Google, the bookmarking sites were showing up for the keywords that I had previously ranked for.

Kinda weird! It is amazing that all of a sudden a few pages of mine can disappear from the Google index overnight, but other pages of my site were still listed, and ranked on page 1 for their terms.

This shows that it is always a good practice to use good SEO titles, such as using your keyword in the title, is a great backup plan for an instance like this. Another great method is to bookmark each page on your sites, not in a spammy way, but to help get it promoted.

The social bookmarking sites are still bringing me some traffic, but not like being on page 1 of the SERP’s was doing.

Also, if you are looking for a way to increase your social bookmarking power, I have purchased Bookmarking Demon and can’t say enough about it. It used to take me about 4 hours to go through my list of bookmarking sites and manually put one entry on each one. Even some of the semi-automatic social posting sites still weren’t all that useful. Since beginning to use Bookmarking Demon, it has cut my time down to about 10 minutes, if even that!

Now, BMD does take a little setting up, but not much. Once you get it set up you are ready to go. Now a disclaimer, Bookmarking Demon is not a spamming tool as spamming the social bookmarking sites will get your account banned forever, and maybe even your IP address blocked. But, if you have several or numerous social bookmarking sites that you use, this tool is well worth the money to speed up the process of submissions.

You can find out more information by reading my special reports on Bookmarking Demon entitled Why Social Bookmarking Works and Secret Traffic Report for more great information and introductions to the power of Bookmarking Demon.

In conclusion

Since we are all at the mercy of Google, ranking well has its benefits. But being prepared for the sandbox or getting de-indexed will only help to transition the time that your site is no longer on the SERP’s.

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