1.  How old is your existing domain?

If your existing domain has some years on it, there’s usually no sense in getting a new one.  Once a domain has aged 1+ years, changing to a new domain should be done tentatively, with a great deal of thought behind it.  Search Engines thrive on trust, and an older domain is a more trusted domain.  To check your domain age, try a Domain Age Checker.

2.  Are you pushing a brand, or just selling a type of product?

If you have your own brand and want to promote it (on the internet or otherwise), it’s much easier for someone to remember a site such as www.nike.com instead of www.runningshoesandclothing.com, as mentioned by Aaron Wall in his article “How to Choose Great Domain Names“.  However, if you are selling running shoes of all brands, the domain www.runningshoes.com makes a lot of sense.

3.  Do you sell one type of product, or many?

One thing you want to try to avoid is pigeon-holing yourself with a domain name.  If you sell lamps, www.lamps.com makes sense, but if you sell lamps, chairs, glue, silly putty, life-sized R2-D2 models, and everything else under the sun, it may be best to just go with your company name, or something like www.everything.com, which encompasses all that you sell, not just one type of product.

Keywords in domain names do help, I’ve seen it time and time again, but another thing to consider is usability — how friendly is the domain name to potential customers?  If customers need to type www.really-great-blue-widgets-that-are-cheap.com into a browser, they aren’t going to be thrilled and probably won’t remember the domain.  And personally I think long domain names look a little unprofessional.  While keywords in domain names can be beneficial, a lot of people get obsessed with the idea that a keyword-rich domain name will automatically rank them for that phrase, and that’s simply not the case.  Plenty of sites do just fine without any keywords in there domain whatsoever.  Ebay, for instance, ranks #1 for the phrase “auction”, and that keyword doesn’t appear anywhere in the domain name, and there are plenty of similar cases.

The best case scenario is to combine your brand and keyword in a memorable, user-friendly manner.   Not to toot my own horn, but dragonflyseo.com is a good example of this.

The bottom line is this: Choose a domain name that makes sense, is easy to remember, and, if possible, contains a keyword or two.  In the end, it’s hard work and good SEO that rank a site for keyword phrases, not the domain name.  This brings me to another point: Unless you have unlimited resources and a team of SEOs working around the clock, please do not buy up domains (microsites) targeting every city in your state for the keyword you want to rank.  I’ve seen this too many times to count and what I always tell people when they ask me to build up every single one of these sites is, “Sometimes it is good to put all of your eggs in one basket.”  In most cases where resources are not unlimited, it makes sense to build up a single site and create individual pages for cities within the site, building links to the individual pages as necessary.  If you’re still thinking about going the microsite route, read this.

With many local clients in Baltimore and throughout Maryland, I became curious about the most competitive phrases in the area where Dragonfly SEO is based.  Who has it toughest where SEO is concerned?  I took ten often-searched keywords and added Maryland to them, resulting in the following 10 keyword phrases:

• maryland hotel
• maryland lawyer
• maryland doctor
• maryland florist
• maryland dentist
• maryland seo
• maryland car dealership
• maryland restaurant
• maryland limo
• maryland photographer

To determine who has it toughest, I utilized 2 tools:  SEOMoz’s keyword difficulty tool and Google Adwords Keyword Tool.  SEOMoz’s tool provided a 1-100% score for keyword phrase difficulty, with 100 being the most difficult to rank for.  From Google Adwords I pulled PPC costs and competition scores, attributing a 30 to High competition results, 20 to Medium, and 10 to Low.  Here are the results:

Unfortunately, the SEOMoz competitive analysis did not return credible results for florist, car dealerships, limo, and photographer, so they were eliminated from the results.  Based on my analysis, the order of difficulty to rank for keywords, with #1 being most difficult, is:

6.  maryland restaurant

5.  maryland doctor

4.  maryland dentist

3.  maryland lawyer

2.  maryland seo

1.  maryland hotel

I’m no statistician and there are probably loads of holes in this study, but the results don’t surprise me.  SEO is naturally near the top because SEOs know how to SEO themselves, and dentists, lawyers, and doctors–all professionals–fall within the same range as each other.   Based on my scoring system, hotels are by far the most difficult to rank for, and if you’re in the hotel business you’ve got your work cut out for you.

This analysis was mostly for personal curiosity, so I wouldn’t cite any of these results in any dissertations if I were you…

Using data from 5 websites, I calculated the percent of total keywords (not total traffic) that showed up as “(not provided)”, first between the dates of Oct. 17-31 and then between Nov. 1-14.  The below chart shows the results:

The average appearance of “(not provided)” between Oct. 17-31 was 2.13%.  The average appearance between Nov. 1-14 was 20.06%, making the average percent increase 1074%.

This information more or less agrees with Search Engine Land’s findings.

The question is:  What does this mean for SEO?  It means that we won’t be able to see information about (based on my results) 10-40% of our keyword searches, the searches coming from those who are most likely the most internet savvy (as they spend enough time online to sign up for Google).  It should be noted that the highest increase in the appearance of “(not provided)” came from my own site (http://dragonflyseo.com), which is heavily focused on bringing traffic in via keywords.  Whether this means that people interested in SEO, either SEOs themselves or people seeking SEO services, are more likely to have Google accounts (and I suspect that SEOs especially are more likely to be signed in to Google) and are therefore more internet savvy, I cannot say.  I don’t think this change greatly affects how SEO should be performed, but I do think it could have serious effects on keyword research, especially if the Google Adwords Keywords tool no longer takes into account keyword searches conducted by logged in users.

In addition, this change can significantly affect conversion calculations.  This is essentially what’s happening:  Say you own a clothing store and are working behind the counter.  You blink your eyes and suddenly a T-shirt is missing off the rack and the money to pay for it is on the counter.  You have no idea who purchased the T-shirt, no idea what demographic they fall into, no idea what brought them to your store in the first place.  You’ve made the money and that’s great, but you don’t know how to attract more people like this paying customer because you have no idea who they were.

Geoff Hoesch is the owner of Dragonfly SEO, a Baltimore-based search marketing firm.

1.  W3C Validation

W3C  represents standard practices in website design that, when followed, make life easier for search engines and ensure that your site has easily readable code.  The last thing you want to do is anger the almighty search engines, so making sure your site is W3C validated is a great way to get your relationship off on the right foot.  I use this W3C validation tool.

2.  Maps Listings

For local businesses especially, a local maps listing is a great way to bring in local customers, and most business owners scramble to get their sites listed with Google Places for business.  However, the other search engines such as Yahoo and Bing, which account for the 20-40% of the market not gobbled up by Google, can be overlooked and listing with them can give you an edge on Google-focused competitors.  Try Yahoo Local and Bing Business Portal.

3.  Non-WWW to WWW Redirect

Although I’ve previously discussed a proper 301 redirect, I haven’t discussed redirecting a non-www to a www.  The danger of having both non-www and www pages is that some of the content may be considered duplicate.  While I think search engines are probably smart enough to figure out what’s going on, it never hurts to ensure that this is never an issue.  A rel=canonical could do the trick or you can just take care of it all in one fell swoop with a non-www to www redirect.  The code, which should be placed in your .htaccess file, looks like this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

(Read more: How to 301 Redirect Non-WWW to WWW URLs | StepForth Web Marketing Inc.)

4.  Unique 404 Page

A 404 page is the thing you see when the page you look for cannot be found.  Most hosts have their own 404 pages that are automatically set up when you create a hosting account, but these aren’t designed specifically for your site.  Although you want to avoid any visitor landing on a 404 page, it does happen, and it’s best to be prepared with a page that has unique copy and utilizes links to redirect visitors (and spiders) to other pages on your website.

5.  ALT img Tags

This seems like common sense (maybe it is) but I have in the past overlooked rewriting ALT img tags on a website.  These are the tags that offer descriptions–which spiders can read– of images–which spiders cannot read.   Without ALT img tags your picture is unknown to spiders, merely a shadowy silhouette on your web page.  If they don’t know what your pictures are about, search engines will have a tough time figuring out what your site is about.  Go through your site and make sure your images are tagged!

Used in accordance with standard SEO practices for a new site, these strategies will help you get your campaign, whether old or new, off on the right foot.

Geoffrey Hoesch is the owner of Dragonfly SEO, a Baltimore-based internet marketing firm.

1. Slow load times can kill a website.  With longer load times, the user tends to leave a page before it loads and return to Google to go to another site.  This return to a Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is called a G-Bounce and it leads us to the next SMX takeaway.

2. Google does not track site analytics as some suspect, because it is not possible to track sites without analytics; however, Google can determine G-Bounces, which say to the search engine that the user did not find what they were looking for on your site.  Keep in mind a G-Bounce is not necessarily bad if a searcher goes to your site, finds what they want, and returns to Google to make a new, unrelated search.  However, when they return to the SERP and go to another listing, that doesn’t look good for you.

3. Although I don’t have the exact statistics, a natural-looking anchor text campaign includes a wide variety of phrases, most often including the site’s name and, even more common, the site’s URL.  A site with all keyword-rich anchor text links may look phony and be penalized for obvious link building practices.

4. 15-20% of all search engine searches now come from mobile devices.  If your site is not optimized for iPhones, Blackberries, etc, you will have slow load times and miss out on the opportunity to snag these visitors/customers.

5. Subdomains are not necessarily considered separate sites.  On large sites such as Yahoo the subdomain autos (i.e. autos.yahoo.com) is treated as a separate site, whereas a small site with a separate subdomain may have that subdomain treated as a different page or folder.  It’s up to the search engine to decide whether to treat your subdomain as a different site or part of the site.

6. An often overlooked strategy for finding local keyword phrases is Google Insights, which can tell you how frequently specific searches are made in your area.  Different areas search phrases in different ways, so this tool is invaluable.

7. Everyone interested in SEO should become familiar with Schema.org, a multiple search engine collaboration that provides information on microdata (such as rel=”author”) that can be included in <head> sections and greatly help search engines figure out how to index pages.  According to one lecturer, those who do not look into schema.org will be left behind.

8. Rel=”canonical” is a great way to avoid duplicate content issues, but Google has announced a new way to handle multiple page postings with the rel=”next” and the rel=”prev” function.   More information can be found at Google Webmaster Central.

9. When asked what is most important for SEO, nearly every expert gave the age-old response of “links and content,” oftentimes adding a social media presence to this list.  One of the major takeaways from SMX East is that Social Media is not a fad and is here to stay, and search marketers who do not take advantage of it will be left in the dust.

10.  Search engines are concerned primarily with user experience, and by catering to the user an SEO theoretically caters to a search engine.  That being said, I should probably add that the point of SEO is to cater to the user while following techniques that make life easier for search engines.  If the whole point of SEO was to create a user experience then every site would be in Flash, which, as we know, is a very, very bad idea.

That’s it!

Geoffrey Hoesch is the owner of Dragonfly SEO, a Baltimore search marketing company.

Almost always, you’ll by trying to find the webmaster, the person with the ability to make changes to the website.  Step one to locating a webmaster email address is to check the ‘Contact Us’ page, which often has a link in the main navigation bar of a site.  On rare occasions, sites–usually larger ones with numerous departments–will list email addresses for their webmaster or for people involved with the website.  Contacting someone in this group, even if they aren’t the webmaster, is a good place to start.

However, it is more often the case that a webmaster is not listed on this page, so you’ll have to do some investigative work.  A good place to begin is by typing ‘webmaster’ and then the URL in the Google search box (i.e.: webmaster www.google.com).  Look at the cached pages and find the highlighted ‘webmaster’ words.  The term webmaster is rarely mentioned on websites unless it’s in reference to contacting them. If this search is unsuccessful, you can try substituting ‘webmaster’ for ‘contact’.

One of the most daunting things a link builder will ever come across is the Contact Form.  Contact forms almost always go to sales representatives who couldn’t care less about your link building efforts, and only in rare instances will a link request via contact form be successful.  At this point it’s time to pick up the phone and actually speak to a human being (a prospect that may be dreadful to the cave or cubicle-bound link builder).  However, you have much better odds calling the phone number and asking to speak with the webmaster than you do with a contact form.  The trick is to be pleasant and provide a legitimate reason for contacting the webmaster (an issue or error on the website, for example).

For more information on what to do once you’ve found the correct email address, check out this previous post on link building emails.

Geoffrey Hoesch is the owner of Dragonfly SEO, a Baltimore, MD SEO Company.

• Search Engine – A search engine is like a magazine that sends out picture-crazed photojournalists who snap photos of absolutely everything they see and then return home, only to unveil those photos any time someone mentions a phrase that is loosely relevant to the place they visited.
• Spider – A spider is said picture-crazed photojournalist, only it is more like Neo in The Matrix because it sees all the numbers that go into making the world of the internet.
• Title Tag – A title tag is like the hat you are wearing, it says a lot about who you are and people will assume it represents what you’re all about.
• META Tags – META tags are kind of like your underwear, in that people cannot see them when they look at you (or your site) but spiders, much like Neo in The Matrix, can see with their super x-ray vision.
• Content – Content is like the T-shirt you are wearing.  You want it to catch passing people’s attention and want people to be able to read it easily and understand it without too much thought.
• Redirect – A redirect is like a guy with orange flags at a concert waving you from one parking spot to another one.
• Analytics – Analytics are like your website’s accountant–they keep track of every little detail.
• Link – If you’re in the mafia, a link is when another guy vouches for you.  A voucher from the Godfather carries a lot more weight than one from a nickle-and-dime shoplifter.
• Reciprocal Link – That’s like when one mafia guy says, “eyy, you’re alright,” and you respond, “eyy, you’re not so bad yourself.”  (Maybe I’m confusing mafiosi with Fonzy?)
• Bing – A community organizer
• Yahoo – A state senator
• Google – Emperor of the known universe
• Aol – The guy on the corner handing out flyers

Feel free to use any of these analogies at your next client meeting or in your next conversation with a non-SEO.  While I can’t guarantee these terms will become any clearer to them, I can guarantee that whomever you are speaking with will think you are a strange, strange person, possibly with an unhealthy obsession for Harry Potter, and possibly a member of the Church of the Fonz…May the Fonz be with you.

Geoff Hoesch is the owner of Dragonfly SEO and is Muggle-born.

Determined to figure out whether this theory was true, and if I was wasting my time attempting to link build on Fridays, I conducted an analysis of 25 completed link requests, all one-way and non-paid, and found some surprising results. And here they are:

Excluding the one lonely Saturday on which I huddled Bob Cratchit-like at my desk while link building, the ordinary Mon-Fri workweek shows a surprising trend: Tuesday success rates are greater than those on other days of the week.  Certain this was just a coincidence, I conducted a little more research and found, not surprisingly, that Tuesday is the most productive day of the workweek.  Although studies have found Fridays to be the least productive, this was not reflected in the sampling.

So if you only have one day a week to do your link building, I’d recommend Tuesday.

I recently began keyword research for a client who sells romance ebooks online.  My initial research showed that the base phrases ‘romance story’ and ‘love story’ would most likely produce the best results (Naturally, I would be targeting longtails containing these base phrases).  As always, I typed each phrase into Google in order to determine the type of competition I’ll be up against and, lo and behold, the results for ‘love story’ returned results for Taylor Swift’s song ‘Love Story’.

In order to determine if this was a recent development that would muddle the keyword phrase for a short while and then pass away, I entered the phrase into Google Trends and found that the traffic for the phrase remained fairly steady until late November 2008, when it received a tremendous spike.  After a little research, I learned that this coincided with the release of Taylor Swift’s album Fearless, featuring the song ‘Love Story’.

Because the inflated results for the phrase ‘love story’ and the high likelihood that traffic may be searching for a Taylor Swift song, I decided to abandon that particular phrase and pursue more promising, less muddled keyword phrases.

Geoffrey Hoesch is the owner of Dragonfly SEO, a Baltimore SEO company.

How to go about adding Content

The most important thing to remember when adding SEO content to your website is to create relevant, well-written content that visitors will find useful.  Keyword-stuffed pages are a thing of the past, and if your pages are unreadable due to poor content or overuse of keyword phrases, visitors won’t stick around.  While it may be tempting to turn to $5/page SEO copywriters, you’ll most likely get what you pay for, and your best bet is to find someone with experience who charges a fair amount for content (anywhere from $20-$50).  Advertising content may be a little more expensive, but you can’t put a price on SEO copywriters who can turn visitors into customers or clients.

Do Your Keyword Research

Before anyone starts typing your content, make sure you can provide 2-3 longtail keyword phrases which the writer should be targeting.  By knowing these phrases prior to creating your SEO content, good writers are able to seamlessly include these phrases without creating awkward content. Specific phrases only need to be included 2-3 times within the content, and I’ve seen instances where phrases don’t appear at all…go figure.

Utilize Your Existing Site

The whole point of creating a new page for your site is to bring in traffic, and if search engines can’t find your page, you won’t get any traffic!  The best way to ensure search engines find your new, fantastically written page is to work on your internal linking structure, building links to your new page from other pages on your site.  When doing this, try to incorporate relevant anchor text.  Also, don’t forget to utilize your new page for internal linking as well, making sure to link out to other pages, thereby developing a rich web of pages.  If you have a sitemap, be sure to include your new page.

Geoffrey Hoesch is the owner of Dragonfly SEO, a SEO company in Maryland focusing on creating rich content and obtaining relevant links for clients.