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Search Engine Optimization Tips And Tricks

By Vittorio Bosio

As we saw in a previous article, SEO consists of two main activities: on-site and off-site optimization. Today I am starting an article series that will give you tips and tricks on how to do on-site optimization, which is the easiest and least time consuming of the two.

Domain Name

If you don’t have a domain name yet, pick one that contains your main keyword.

The ideal would be to have a domain like “mainkeyword.com”, but it is going to be very hard to find it available nowadays. You can try with “yourmainkeyword.com” or “mainkeyword4you.com”, though.

People tend to trust (and remember) .com domains better. If you really can’t find the right fit in a .com, you can still go with a .net, if you want.

Having your main keyword in your domain name will help you because:

  1. websites with the main keyword in their domain name tend to perform better
  2. the keyword will be shown in bold in the search results, thus making your listing stand out
  3. since it is important to have your keyword in the anchor text (clickable text) of the links pointing to your website, a keyword-rich domain will help you even in those cases where people link to you with your domain as the link anchor text.

Do you already have a domain name? Even if it doesn’t contain your main keyword, you can still benefit from it. Google tends to like older domains, because it feels those are “real businesses”, that are there to stay. It is not uncommon to see remarkable ranking improvements with just some on-site optimization, in these cases. Just follow the tips I am about to give you.

Navigation

The technology you use for your website navigation has an impact on how many pages the search engine will index. Search engines can only follow standard html links.

If your website navigation is based on a flash animation, the search engines won’t be able to spider your pages. The same holds true for Javascript.

Page Names

It doesn’t matter the technology you use to create your pages. Google will index .htm, .asp, .php, .aspx pages and many other formats (including word documents and pdf files, for example).

The way you name your pages, though, can have an influence on your rankings. Having keywords in your page names can help you from an SEO perspective.

Instead of “yourwebsite.com/page.php?id=bluewidgets”, use something like “yourwebsite.com/blue-widgets.php”. Separate the words in the page name with a dash, so that Google knows where every word starts and ends.

More To Come

The list of on-page optimization tricks is not over. Wait for my next article to find out more. If you have any questions or comments on what you just read, please leave a comment below.

About the author: If you are interested in video tutorials and articles that can teach how to increase your web site traffic and build a list of targeted prospects for your business, you are going to like what Vittorio Bosio is saying on his blog: www.TechSavvyMarketer.com.

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This entry was posted on Friday, December 7th, 2007 at 5:49 am and is filed under Lead Generation, Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

  • Totally agree, so many people choose their domain name without doing some serious research on keywords, but it is so important for getting easy search rankings!
  • I have a question that I hope someone here can answer. Does it make a difference whether or not you have your internal linking structure using absolute, relative, or full qualified INTERNAL links? I ask this because I was researching other peoples rankings on google using 'link:www.domain.com' and it appeared that people using a FULLY QUALIFIED internal links were getting higher ranks than people using regular relative or absolute links. It looked like google was treating the fully qualified links as external links rather than internal links....

    Anyone?

    -Sheila
    Tampa Real Estate
    <abbr>Sheila's last blog post..Be Thankful for what you have</abbr>
  • Is there really that much emphasis placed on the domain name in Google? It's pretty obvious that live.com live on that and to a lesser degree yahoo, but google?
  • Consider two things very important for increasing position in Google serps and for a better Google PR: page titles and website map.
  • Thanks for this article and I thoroughly agree about the keyword rich domain names ranking well on search engines like google. In fact if from the very start you choose well, the amount of link building you need to get high SERP rankings is reduced :)
  • We opted to put our last name in our URL and luck for us we have an older domain so ranking for our keywords is doable. We do have some newer keyword rich domains with dashes in them that are ranking very well as well. I would always choose keyword rich domain names - even if I had to go .net. The dashed URLs are not as desirable but they are fine for backup or smaller websites.
  • That is an interesting article. In our experience website owners find it difficult to understand visitor behaviour even with good systems such as Google Analytics.

    We have recently come across an excellent piece of software that not only allows them to monitor individual user behaviour in real time, but also facilitates direct engagement between visitor and user. This has been increasing conversions by an average of 15% in the websites we have implemented it in.

    It seems that the individualised data gives a more enlightening perspective.
  • Good article. We have noticed definate changes in the Serps when we optimize our page titles and descriptions. We still fight the jumbled _20_ characters in some of our interior page names but we are working on that. We have not used flash or java for a while now. It slows the site down and the spiders just dont like it.
  • Great advise, Will be back often and read more interesting thoughts.
  • Excellent article.
    I personally use IBP, that compares your pages with the first 10 in the serps giving you great hints on how to optimise a page, and SEO For Firefox, a really nice tool.
    I will check out seodigger.com which I didn't know. Thank you for pointing it out.
  • Meghna
    Hi,

    I was going to write about Nemeas software but looks like there someone already pointed it out. It really is a effective tool for domain name optimization.

    Thanks for the great tips in this issue (both parts).

    On an ending note, I just loved your blogs. Its given me great tips for my own work (I am a freelance technical writer). Will definitely be back.

    Have a great day.
  • Great tips. Thanks for sharing. I need to find the subscribe button
  • Hey guys,

    thanks for your comments.

    I found out recently about seodigger.com and love it. Instead of SeoQuake, I use SEO For Firefox, created by Aaron Wall. They are both excellent extensions.

    I never heard of Nemeas before. Thanks for pointing that out!
  • halfa lump
    And on the subject of Domain Name optimization, there's a simple, but really effective tool called Nemeas (www.Nemeas.com).

    Basically, if you have a list of possible domains and a keyword you're looking to optimize for, it quickly takes your list and ranks each name based on a built in database of high and low ranking domains and URLs. Awesome for people who buy in bulk, or if you're just looking to get started off on the right foot.

    Looking forward to reading more.
  • Nice issue!
    I can recommend you use seodigger.com for keyword tracking, just trace your best competitors keywords and positions in SERP, they've done all the work allready :-). And try SeoQuake, seo toolbar. It can analyze anything you may need including keyword density on a page. https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/3036/ - for Firefox. seoquake.com - for IE.
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