ejcross.com » SEO

Domain Names – Personal or Keyword?

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 02:30:59 +0000

One of the most important and difficult choices that someone that is beginning a website can make is what to name it. What do you want your domain name, or website name, to be? Do you want it to be a reflection of yourself? Do you want it to be related to the topic you love?

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?

The Power of Squidoo

Elliott — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 14:21:05 +0000

One of the things we are always looking for is how we can increase the exposure to our sites, thus leading to numerous things. Whether you are looking for an increased readership, increased affiliate income, or just some extra backlinks, Squidoo might be a good option for you.

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!

A Little Experiment into Keywords

Elliott — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 10:07:45 +0000

Well, you have probably noticed some unusual posts around here lately. Not the normal topics for my blog, but content none the less. There is a reason for this and actually, there are two reasons.

You might be thinking that I have sold out, but not really. Sure, I needed some cash to fund other projects, but there was a deeper meaning to my madness in the change in post topics.

One of the issues I was facing is the shortage of funds to buy some domain names and software that I was needing for some new niche blogs that I am working on. You can read more about niche marketing if you are interested, it really is fascinating stuff with all of the research and long tail keywords.

Anyways, as I said earlier, these posts were kind of two-fold, with the first purpose to be bringing me in some cash. The second purpose was an experiment in keywords and marketing.

You see, this blog is a PR 5, something to be pretty proud of in less than a year. I’m not really sure how I did that, but I thank each of my readers for helping get me there.

Out of curiosity I wrote those posts with certain keywords in mind. And you know what? It is showing.

I have seen a huge increase in my traffic over the last month or so since writing those posts. Sure, they aren’t really for certain keywords that a SEO blog would be targeting, but that is ok.

This shows an important lesson to anyone that is thinking of blogging, starting a new blog, or getting into expanding their collection of blogs.

If you create a new domain name for a niche or other topic, you run a risk of getting sandboxed. However, if you have an aged domain with PR, you can quickly get your posts indexed and begin getting traffic to your site.

Several of the posts that I wrote were indexed within two hours by Google. Pretty quick and good! Now, just imagine if they were on the hot topic of the day, with some juicy affiliate ads or other stuff…

Win a Million Dollar Wiki Page

Elliott — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 20:06:52 +0000

Ok, so I have been absent for a little while. I have been really busy working some new niche sites that I am creating and dealing with some other issues.

But, if you would like a chance to win a million dollar wiki page, you need to check this out.

This wiki page on the million dollar wiki is in a sweet spot! It is for the term “Dating Site” and is number 8 on the most popular pages list. The rules are really simple, so I won’t bore you with them.

Head on over to Work From Home Jobs and visit this site, it has lots of great info! Or, you can head directly to the Million Dollar Wiki Page Contest to see more details about this contest!

Optimize Your Site for Adwords

Elliott — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 11:52:09 +0000

You might be thinking why in the world you would want to optimize your site for Adwords. One of the things that I have been reading a lot about lately is how Adwords and Adsense work closely together. In addition, the main component that ties the two together is the Google Search.

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?