Why Owning your own Domain Name is Important!
 
Would you buy a car and put it in a strangers name? Of course not, that’s just silly. Well, would you buy a house and put it in a stragers name? C’mon that’s insane! Well, would you buy a domain name and put it in a strangers name?

Well, would you? … The sad fact is the answer to this is YES. This, to me is one of the most frequent mistakes business owners make. Why would they do this? There are many reasons. Here are a few I hear daily. “I am too busy, can you do it?”, “I have a web person and they handle everything”, “It only costs $10 a year, no biggy if I loose it”, “I don’t know how to buy a domain name”, “What’s a domain name?” and “I don’t like using credit cards on the Internet and this guy had a paypal account so I just….”. These are just a few but you would be amazed at some I hear.

I sell domain names from http://yesitisavailable.com for $8.99 a year and I must admit some of the horror stories I hear from people that have let their friends, wives, husbands, husband’s dogs, Tyrone, their web developer, etc.. purchase and own their web domain names is sad.

One client allowed someone that worked for them who was also making their website get a friend who was hosting the site purchase the domain name. Did you follow that, an owner’s employee’s friend that hosted the site owned it. Well thats cool from a stand point of getting things done! kudos there. Here is what happened, this friend went through a hard time and sadly ended up committing suicide. BTW, this is the third time I have come across a sad story like this. I think you know where this is heading, when the renewal for the domain name came up there was no one around to renew it. Here is where it begins to get worse. The website domain went up for purchase and the expired web domain name porn kings quickly had the domian purchased and pointed to porn sites in a matter of minutes from purchasing the domain name. Now, not only did the client loose thier domain name that they spent thousands of dollars on marketing such as business cards, yellow pages, let alone online Internet marketing, but all the programming and web development, marketing, search engine placement and personal client bookmarks and backlinks from their wonderfully happy clients now pointed to porn. They lost their reputation and many of thier clients. What a horror story! Not only is this true, but trust me, this happens all the time!

I have more horror stories and would be happy to share them with you if you are not yet sold on being owner of your domain name.

As a developer I do understand that the whole Internet website thing can be a bit overwhelming. If you have a developer and you entrust them to purchase your domain names for you make sure they transfer the domain name after purchase to you. If your developer does not suggest this in the first place, get a new developer. If your developer has a problem with this, get a new developer. I have purchased domain names for clients. Once I recieve payment for the domain name in one form or another I transfer the domain to the client. I usually keep my name as a technical contact (one of four contacts for the domain name) incase there is a problem or upon renewal if the owner of the domain can not be contacted.

One other piece of advice when purchasing a domain name is to use a public email address such as a yahoo, gmail, msn, etc email address for the contact email of the domain name. If you use one of your domain emails such as bonnie@mycooldomainname.com as the contact for the domain name and your webhost provider goes out of business you will not receive emails and might not be able to renew your domain name.

Here is an article by Trish JOnes on this subject as well.
http://www.trishjones.com/own-your-domain-name-or-else/

Here is another helpful document as to why you should have a domain name.
http://www.ecomhelp.com/KB/internet/kb_your-own-domain-name.htm

Hope this helps.

If you would like to read articles about website development please join my Better
Business Builders group ‘Website Tips’ or visit my blog at http://peuan.com/seoblog/ 

Keyword density

Keyword density is the percentage of times a keyword or phrase appears in a page. So if there are 500 words on a page and your keyword “pigdog” appears 50 times on the page, then the keyword density for the word “pigdog” would be 10 or 10%.

Keyword density is used by search engines to determine whether a web page is relevant to a keyword or keyword phrase.

It is believed that the first 2 or 3 paragraphs of a page have more importance than the rest of a page when search engines ‘look’ at a page. In fact the closer to the top of the page the better. So if you can have keywords as the first words of the body text of a page that this is better to search engines.

What should I Avoid?

Some things to avoid would be Search spaming or as Eric Convey calls spamindexing. Spamindexing is a tactic used by black-hat SEO or individuals that do not know better where they repeat unrelated keywords or keyword phrases in an attempt to manipulate SERPs (search engine result pages) so that their pages show up more frequently in SERPs. Many search engines check for spamdexing and remove suspected pages from their indexes. The goal of search engines is to provide useful or relevant content to searchers. Rule of thumb here is that you know if you are trying to ‘fool’ search engines. If you want better results, then you should just be honest and natural. Yes, there are some rules to follow that you normally would not but the bottom line is honesty is being rewarded by SEs today. Spamindexing renders search engines useless. Google, the dominant search engine today is a multi billion dollar company. The do not take spamindexing lightly. Do you have the resources to combat a company that has resources that billions of dollars provide? I, for one, do not.

Another tactic used is Keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is the practice of placing within a page keywords specifically to raise the count, variety and ultimately density of specific keywords even though the keywords are in fact relevant. Yes, we need to understand some of the ‘rules’ used by SEs to show up more frequently on SERPs but you have to try to keep it as natural as possible. One of the ways SEs analyze keyword stuffing is to look at keyword density of other sites with similar keywords. If your site has an abnormally high keyword density then your page becomes ’suspect’ to keyword stuffing and you might be removed from SE indexes. One method used is to put hidden text that a site might use for say a “Andrea Bocelli” fan site, the talented opera singer, thus your page shows up on more SERPs. Please be aware that Keyword stuffing is considered unethical to SEs. Keyword stuffing is one of the main reasons that SEs have lowered the importance of meta tags and some totally ignore them. These tactics have made SEO more difficult for the common website. Today, most search engines rely on off-site links to a site to help ranks sites. One of the problems with off-site links is that the people that put links to other sites don’t always spend a lot of time ensuring that their anchor text to the site is optimum for that sites SEO or Ranking. However, on the other side of that scenario, if you really like a site, then yes you are going to put more relevant anchor text and general text around that link. ie: this site is a great site chalked full of SEO tips and one of the most useful sites for SEO tips I have seen. The author of this site is an experts on SEO issues and provides tips most will find useful as well as tips you might be unaware of. So, if you want to learn from an expert be sure to visit < some link> Andy’s SEO BOOK website < end of link > and increase your rankings and traffic.

Some other Tactics To Stay Away From or Risk being Banned

Scrapper Sites — These sites take various result pages content and make new ‘unique’ pages or on-the-fly content. These sites are sometimes known as ‘Made for Adsense’ sites.

Meta Tag stuffing — unrelated keywords in meta tags.

Doorway Pages (Gateway Pages) — Low quality pages stuffed with similar keywords or keyword phrases. Some pages have for the most part gibberish on the pages while others have a “click here to enter” link.

Invisible or hidden text — same color text as background, no frames,  Zero framesets or divs.

Splogs — Spam Blogs are fake blogs usually with Keyword rich fake content. These sites usually have a lot of advertisements on them. The user ends up on this splog, is bored to death and clicks on a relevant advertisement. If these sites have links to other splogs or sites then they fall into the category ‘Link Farm’.

What is Acceptable Keyword Density? 

If your site page has 500 words and 250 words are keywords, search engines will flag your page and your site may be banned. This is the wrong way to attain good rankings.

My Recommendation is to have a keywords density of 4-8% maximum and probably 3% to be safe.

Today, it is quite easy to check your keyword density as there are many tools out there that do this now. One sites tool I like is:
http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html

However, a quick search of Google on Keyword density or Keyword Density Tool will give you many to choose from.
 

What keywords should I use?

Before writing any html code for a webpage you should perform some sort of keyword analysis. Most website development totally ignores this step with corporate websites being guilty of this most. This step is most crucial in making sure that real people NOT in your industry find you. Knowing who you customers are helps.

Some questions you need to be able to answer are:

• Is your audience likely to search for industry standard terms or simple layman phrases?
• Which products/services have the highest profit margin? If you had just a $0.50 mark-up on a very popular product/service, could you sell enough online to make a profit? A product that is less searched but has a higher profit margin would be easier to obtain a search engine ranking and would yield higher revenues.
• Identify your biggest competitors. View competitor websites and see which products they appear to target; which search phrases do they have rankings for?

So here are a few steps you should follow to obtain the best keywords for your website.

Step 1: Real World Analysis

Send all your friends, family and colleagues an email or give them a sheet of paper with the following question on it stating specifically that you need 5 answers:

If you were searching for a web site with content identical to, or of the same theme as www.yourdomain.com, what word, or better word combinations (2-4 words) would you type into the search box? Please give 5 possible search terms or search term phrases that you believe are relevant to www.yourdomain.com content.

1 _______________
2 _______________
3 _______________
4 _______________
5 _______________
It is important to make sure you actually write a numbered list 1 to 5 leaving spaces for them to fill in! Otherwise you mightfind that you generally get just one or two possible keywords or phrases. As your audience to fill in all five.
Step 2: Analyze your competitors Keywords

You can best find your competitors websites by searching with what you believe to be your own top three keywords and taking a look at the source code of the top 5 web sites in the results. Paying special attention to the contents of the title tag (<title>…</title>) and of course the keyword <meta name=”keywords”… and description <meta name=”description”… meta tags is vital. These should help you get some keyword ideas. You can count on it that your competitors have done the same for their own sites.
Step 3: Analyze the most popular searches for your industry

Use keyword phrases instead of single keywords for high competition industries.

Plan for a maximum of only 3 keyword (phrases) per page.

Any more and you end up diluting the effect of any optimization for each of your keywords.

Understanding which keywords/Keyword phrases are being search by prospective customers is gold.

Chart of tools for popular searches
http://infopeople.org/search/chart.html

dwoz search trackers
http://www.dwoz.com/Default.asp?Pr=50

A good tool for Keyword suggestions is Overture
http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

A Thesaurus might help identifying keywords for your industry.
http://thesaurus.reference.com/

Another Useful link is:
Google search Operators
http://www.google.com/help/operators.html

Effective Anchor Text Tips

Anchor text is the text you see that is linked. For example Paul’s Hit team, the text is obvious and link you go to is http://peuan.com. The Anchor text is Paul’s Hit Team.

Anchor Text is usually on links that link to your webpage. These are called inbound links and search engines use this text, especially Google, to determine what they show in thier SERPs. Anchor text has a huge effect on page rankings. In fact, with enough inbound links with effective anchor texts, a webpage can attain a high page ranking even if they do utilize any other forms of SEO. Anchor text is usually the deciding factor for very difficult and competitive SERPs.

So, to use anchor text effectively you need to ensure that the anchor text is relevant to the page it links to. It is not going to help a page about fish if the anchor text says something like “the best bikes on earth”. A site that links to another site with effective anchor text can benefit as well, however, this is not always the case. When you link to a page, if your intent is to give a value added backlink then using keywords that appear on the linked to page, preferably keywords in the h1 tag of the page or keywords in the first couple sentences would be most beneficial to both the linked page and your page you are linking from.

If you add other related anchor text links on the page that is linked to, you can benefit more, so add related links to your pages whether via a menu or linked body text in your page. As well if you link this page to itself helps too.

There are many problems with anchor text such as descriptive text, space limitations, etc. One of the problems is that you might only have so much space. You might be linking from a menu that is only so wide. Making the link descriptive might make your link wrap around and take away the professional look of your page. Even though SEs like this, us humans do not. We need to find a balance, if you were to write your pages so that search engines loved them, people surfing to your pages might not and quickly type in a new url or even worse just close the browser tab.

One of the biggest mistakes I see, which I myself am guilty of is having a ‘home’ link in menus, after all I do not want to compete or waste my valuable anchor text trying to rank in SEs for the word ‘home’. With that said, I do want my visitors to easily navigate through my site.. so naming my ‘home’ link ‘SEOBlog@Peuan Home’ would be more effective. This gives a perfect example of space limitations as I can’t afford a long name like that.

If you use an image as a header on your page as many sites do, then the ALT or alternative text of an image tag is the same as the anchor text of a link. Also, you might use an image to link to a site or you might provide a link with an image for people to easily link to your site. So I could make a nice ‘Home’ image for my menu and use descriptive alt text to get past this space limitation of a menu width.

Here is an example of alt text used on an image with rich descriptive text. To see the text put your mouse pointer over the image.

Even if you have images that are non-linked such as just pretty graphics you will benefit using the alt text option of the img src code.One last thing about links is to use the title option when linking. Use descriptive text and get the most of your links. Here is
the code used for the image link above. Notice the “title” in the href link and the “alt” text for the image. As you can see you have lots of space for descriptive text you can take advantage of without mucking up your page layout.

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