In real estate, the adage is “location, location and location”. On the Internet, the equivalent might well be “relevance, relevance and relevance”. The Internet is all about information. Internet users (or at least those that matter commercially) are looking for information. The vast majority of information is sourced via keyword searches and although there are many critical elements in achieving high rankings, the user browsing the SERPs results can hardly fail to be influenced by the domain name, site title and description or “snippet”. In essence, this defines the identity of the site and should help in establishing credibility in the mindset of this user, encouraging further examination — and those all important clicks.

Identity
Market positioning is one of the most important considerations. A combination of science, art and sheer luck are needed when selecting a domain name. While it may be desirable to have the name of the product or service being marketed as the main arbiter of choice, this can sometimes result in a generic name and it is a near certainty that competitors will have already have registered that version. The longer term view is also essential. Today, the business may sell only industrial engineering components, but next year may wish to expand into lawn mowers, washing machines or any number of different product areas. www.engineeredcomponents.com might be suitably generic and appropriate, but www.thermalcontrols.com might be more relevant to the desired search terms. A balancing act.

Search terms
Let us not forget that search terms should be one of the main drivers in the selection of a domain name: the search engines are still highly sensitive to the presence of keywords in domain names, with highly ranked sites of fairly questionable quality enjoying a level of exposure that must surely be largely as a result of a well chosen domain name. Acronyms are also tricky. Although they can often be more readily purchased, they can also be meaningless, unless they are widely recognised (and searched for) in the industry. FBI.co.uk may be memorable, but who would immediately recognise it as the identity of “Fred’s Boat Insurance”?

Top level domains (TLDs)
It may be possible to obtain an attractive domain by opting for a .biz. .net or similar variation, but there is inherent danger in creating confusion between two competitors. The major players will, in any case, have instigated a land grab for their primary domains by registering all of the common variants. Additionally, this trick is ethically questionable and may even see you answering a lawsuit for “passing off” or trademark infringement! In the UK, a simple free of charge check using the Companies House online system will allow you to search for companies of the same (or very close) name as your proposed domain. If they exist, choose another.

If you operating specifically within one region then choosing the top level domain relevant to the country in question is generally the best option. If selling to UK customers, for example, a.co.uk TLD would be beneficial and those targeting foreign markets should apply the same rule. The search engines are sensitive to this when it comes to ranking you in the relevant in-country results. It is also worth noting that they are sensitive to the geographical location of your IP address so you should always physically host the site in the country that matches your top level domain.

If your target market is not geography specific then a .com, .net, .biz or any of the ever-growing set of location-independent top level domains should suffice and can be hosted in the location of your choice.

The long and the short of it
There is a widespread preference for shorter and punchier domain names. They are easier to remember and are more likely to be directly entered into a browser address bar. However, when it comes to SEO and affiliate marketing, short may not always be best. Sometimes it’s advisable to go for the longer, more specific domain name in order to tap into the right kind of traffic – traffic that will result in commissions from conversion. For example, you could go for cheapholidays.biz and you may, with good SEO and a lot of work, get lots of traffic in time. However, if you are more specific with your domain name, opting instead for something along the lines of cheapgreekpackagetours.com, then the traffic should be that much more focused. Once again, it is worth emphasising that your choice of domain name should be driven by your keyword focus.

The second advantage to choosing longer, more specific domain names is that it will generally be far cheaper to buy them. However, memorability cannot be ignored. www.bustoursforseniors.com is a pretty good indicator as to what the website will do but who will remember www.bustoursforseniorsrus.com? In competitive sectors, look for a good combination of domain name and TLD and be prepared to use dashes.

Dash it!
We have also explored the use of dashes within domain names elsewhere here at lammo.net, with a general conclusion that dashes in domain names of sensible length such as cheap-greek-package-tours.com may be advantageous as it is easier for the search engines to break these down into their constituent keywords. Similarly they are easier for the user to read and to understand. Clearly the madly long domain names we see with umpteen words separated by dashes are seen by search engines and users alike as being rather spammy so some balance is required.

Finally, the relationship between the domain name, the keywords and the site content must be valid. Human searchers and the search engines alike will react badly to weak content, poorly organised information or simple lack of relevance of the domain name and keywords to the site content itself. Conversely, getting the combination right will pay dividends and should be well worth the considerable effort involved.

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

What’s in a name?

Related posts:

1. To Dash or not to Dash?
2. Should you still use Meta Tags?
3. Should you link in content? Damn right you should!

We’re always being asked to click “here” or visit “this site” online whether we’re reading a blog, a forum post or indeed on sites of just about any type you care to think of. There is a widely held idea that constructing a sentence that instructs the viewer to click ‘here’ for more details and using the ‘here’ as the anchor text for a link to a partner’s site is the most natural way in which to build links. Rather than telling you straight away whether this is actually a good idea or not, let’s perform a simple test. Head over to Google and type in “click here”. Then hit search and see what pops up. We’ll wait a minute.

Done? It was Adobe’s homepage wasn’t it? Even if you just go for “here” Adobe pops up as number three. This is because there are so many thousands of sites linking to its homepage to allow their users to download one of the software products that have become indispensable in today’s online world. Almost every one of them links to Adobe by asking their users to “click here” or “here”.

The power of anchor text
This is a clear demonstration of the influence of anchor text in search engine rankings. In a sentence that is designed to get people to download an essential program this is fine. For other sites, not as useful. If all of your inbound links are for the text “here” or “click here” then there’s virtually no chance that you’ll ever get your site anywhere near the top of the search engine rankings – certainly not through your link building efforts alone. Though it may seem ‘natural’ to a person who spends much of their time reading things online, it doesn’t adhere to the way in which search engines work. The anchor text (the text displayed for the link itself) should therefore contain keywords which are relevant and which support your site’s keyword strategy. The same thing applies to your own internal linking endeavours. Links on your own site, whether on navigation menus, headers, footers and in-line in text should also contain relevant anchor text.

Choosing the right text
For all but the most strongly ranked sites, it is essential that you avoid the overly competitive, generic keywords. “Here” is potentially the best example of such a keyword! The key to link building and to creating the kind of natural link structure that should assist in improved search engine ranking for your site is both specificity and diversity. Choose keywords or phrases that best represent the content of your site. Back them up with plenty of high quality content that is coherent, uniquely written and of absolute relevance to your site. Ensure that any links you have agreed with partners are “deep links” pointing to the page that has the greatest relevance to the anchor text in the link.

A little subtlety goes a long way
It is worth avoiding repeatedly using exactly the same keywords or phrases to land on the same page. Not only will this look questionable to the search engines (considerable effort is spent looking for excessive “patterns”) but it may also limit your chances of reaching the ever diverse internet audience, many of whom will come up with some very odd keyword choices when searching for precisely the kinds of things your affiliate site is promoting. Whilst relevance is critical, you should go for a range of relevant anchor text keywords for each page.

Some people talk about linking volume being important. Whilst much depends on the competitiveness of the category and your chosen keywords, it isn’t all about big numbers. Rather, the search engines are looking for the ongoing acquisition of a modest number of good, relevant links on an ongoing basis. This signals that your site is alive and well and that it is regarded as being of value by an ever-growing online community. Conversely, any site which instantly gets thousands of inbound links before it has really got on its feet will potentially be seen as search engines as attempting to gain unfair advantage in some way or other, with the assumption being that it may be guilty of link buying or other shady exploits. You run the risk of being blacklisted as a result.

At the end of the day, a sentence which instructs the user to actively click on something, whether it’s with a “click here” or a “this site” piece of anchor text, is a sentence which is clearly revealing the intentions behind its link. Not only will it look and feel like an exercise in link building and deter visitors from clicking on the link, but it will also ultimately compromise your potential search engine rankings when you consider that you could have presented your link in a far more organic, natural, keyword-driven way.

Lack of control
Now whilst you can request the keywords or phrases that you’d like for the anchor text for your link, without having direct control over the content on the other site there is of course no guarantee that the link will be placed exactly as you wish. If you are gaining the link as a result of trading content in return for the link as we have described elsewhere here at lammo.net, the best way around this is to provide the content with your link subtly pre-included, usually best within the body of the text, in context. That way you’ll be sure that your link will occur in the best possible way within a natural sentence structure and with the required anchor text. Many busy webmasters will be only too happy that you have already done the contextual work for them!

In conclusion, although there is a widespread tendency for clicking “here” online it doesn’t mean that in the affiliate world this is a useful way of building links that form the “natural” pattern seen as desirable by the search engines. Once again we come to the realisation that building links the ‘hard’ way is the only way in which to create tangible results and pave the way for future success for your affiliate site.

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

Should you link-build for “here”?

Related posts:

1. Using article sites to build links – Good idea?
2. Should you link in content? Damn right you should!
3. Link Building: Strategies for a fair exchange of value

Mini sites remain a popular approach among content and SEO affiliates. For those of you who have yet to play with them, a mini site generally consists, as the name suggests, of a relatively small number of pages focused on a specific theme and with a relevant domain name, strong on-page SEO and great content. Although less fashionable than perhaps three or four years ago, mini sites remain a useful tool for affiliates wishing to promote niche merchants, products and services. This approach can be particularly useful for affiliates whose main sites are perhaps cross-category directories or shopping portals for which it can be hard to achieve search engine rankings in some of the tougher categories.

Assuming that you are trying to drive natural search traffic as opposed to simply using the site as a set of PPC landing pages, the acquisition of good inbound links is going to be essential. There is an element of “chicken and egg” with linking: webmasters want to trade links with sites that are already ranked but it is hard to get ranked without links. The type, quality and location of the first five links therefore become critical in kick-starting a linking campaign.

Techniques
Since you cannot yet offer a ranked page as a “fair exchange of value” for linking, you will need to offer some form of content instead. One popular approach utilises social media sites such as Digg, Squidoo and other blogging and article publishing platforms. Articles that are of particular interest to the selected group and contain a naturally inserted link to your mini site should certainly help in initiating the linking process. Because many of these sites are strongly ranked by the search engines and are regarded as being independent rather than overtly commercial sites, such links can over time contribute significantly to ranking. They key here is to ensure that the sites you choose do not use the dreaded “nofollow” tag with links. Many social media sites have employed this: a technique originally introduced by Google to allow the webmasters of blogs and social media sites to “tell” the search engine spiders not to follow – or at least not to confer ranking as a result of – a given link. This was in response to excessive numbers of low value posts from webmasters seeking only the link and offering relatively little in the way of intellectual property or value in return.

Spotting the use of nofollow is generally fairly easy. Simply view the source of some of the posts and pages on the site in question and search for “nofollow”. If this is included in the links from posts or articles, remove the site from your set of targets and move one.

For those sites that appear to be relevant to your audience and in which there is no evidence of the nofollow tag, make sure that you produce material that is of genuine use to visitors. One ever popular technique is to search for relevant questions raised around subjects related to your own mini site. You then add a materially useful response to the social media site, perhaps covering the issues in some – but not complete – detail and include a link to a highly detailed and relevant piece on your own site which completes and adds value to your explanation. Simply adding an “I’ve answered it here” post isn’t sufficient as it doesn’t provide the site social media site owner with any content of value to be associated directly with their own domain.

This approach allows you to put most of the effort into the piece on your mini site (which will of course add to your own content score over time) and to re-use this effectively by creating multiple value-added posts pointing at it. If the quality of your material is at the right level and the relevance is good, you should find that many of the posts will be accepted and the link duly added.

Article sites and directories
Whilst these remain a popular form of promotion for both new and established sites, it is important to recognise that with the exception of DMOZ and the Yahoo directories (both of which will require that you have significant original material on the site and are pretty hard to enter sites with significant affiliate links present on them), the value of article sites and directories as link partners has diminished over the last two to three years. Although we are not huge fans of the dreaded green bar Google page rank indicator here at lammo.net (because it is so infrequently updated and is but one of many ranking factors), it IS a useful indicator as to whether the lower level pages in directories and article sites are actually being ranked. If you can find articles from an article site highly ranked in the search engines or you can see that the detail pages or an article site or directory have a page rank above zero, it may be worth the effort. If not, move on!

Buying links
Tempting as it may be in the early days of promoting an unranked site and despite the number of webmasters who will happily offer you a link for a fee, never go down this road. This is explicitly against the search engines’ terms of service. Through senior contacts in the industry we know that it IS reported and it IS penalised when discovered.

Self promotion
One historically popular solution has been for affiliates to use their own site(s) to link back to a new mini-site. Most affiliates have more than one site so it is arguably fairly simple to link to your mini site from several sources. If you have an established site that gets plenty of traffic and is steadily climbing the search rankings then linking to your new mini site could surely prove to be advantageous? The issue here is that the search engines dislike site networks. They are easy to detect: common IP addresses, WHOIS data, nameservers and so forth. Even if you keep all of these elements separate and distinct for each of your sites, excessive linking between a set of sites has been known to be penalised. Why? From a search engine perspective, this mirrors the behaviour of many low rent link building firms who constantly hit the same database of targets with link requests and over time accidentally create a “warm network” effect as a result. Similarly, many linking solutions use collectively owned (often by the link builders themselves) site networks, numbering thousands of separate domains, in order to appear to “trade” links for their clients. There is usually little value in these domains and the search engines are on a mission to weed them out from the SERPs results. Inversely, cross-links from multiple mini sites to one central domain are generally held to be akin to a “doorway” approach and are equally likely to incur the wrath of the search engines. By cross-linking between your own web properties you are mirroring questionable techniques and running the risk of a penalty – including the potential loss of those hard won rankings for your more established sites. Avoid!

Timings
Those first five links are essential. Natural, unique links to relevant and significant topics that are not reciprocated are the goal. Social networking sites are potentially powerful allies if you can get the technology to work in your favour, but there’s no guarantee of instant success. Whatever the initial set of sites you choose as link partners, it is important to recognise that it will take time – often many months – before you see any significant effect on search engine rankings as a result of your link building efforts. Until your site has a visible Google page rank and is appearing reasonably highly in the results for relevant search terms, it makes sense to continue to focus on offering value in the form of content in starting the long journey of building solid rankings.

Originally written by Lammo.net, a blog all about Affiliate Marketing

Your first five links

Related posts:

1. Using article sites to build links – Good idea?
2. How to build links to your Affiliate Website
3. Should you link in content? Damn right you should!