Choosing the right domain name can help link building

It’s kind of obvious that having a targeted keyword in your domain name is going to help you in some respects in terms of rankings. However there are other indirect benefits of choosing a domain name with keywords included in them.

Natural links

These natural/organic/golden/mythical links which are generated over a long period of time are the ones Matt Cutt’s and Google say will bring the most value to any website. It just so happens I agree with them (lucky Google), however if you run a small to medium sized website they are often few and far between. Ideally you would hope that the anchor text given out of generosity would contain your desired keywords, however if your company/domain name does not contain any keywords then the likelihood of this happening is very small. If your domain name is keyword driven then guess what – you’ll probably get a bunch of desired anchor text links naturally.

Directory listings

Now it’s fairly easy to get into most directories, except a few high value ones which have certain criteria’s for listings. One such common listing must is that your website anchor text be your website or company name. Bad news for the majority of websites out there as you are probably losing a little bit of value by having your brand name as your anchor text. However if you have desired keywords in your website name then your anchor text is much more appropriate to the phrases you’re trying to target. Of course directory owners have the right to refuse your listing, but the majority which come with a sign up or review fee will gladly accept such a method.

Blog Links

As many of you will know or should do, the most common referrals in a blog posts are:

• Joe blogs at Website name

• Source: Website name

• Website Name

These phrases are generally used the most by bloggers (not necessarily SEO bloggers) to describe a finding online or to point to a recommended resource. So it really does pay to have keywords in your domain name as the amount of targeted natural links you will acquire will be much larger than if your domain/company name has no keywords associated with them.

For years now the hype behind content “being king” has always seemed a little exaggerated to me. Sure content is important but the power of links has always seemed to outweigh ranking performance every time. Content should always be the foundation to a good website with the users experience in mind, following this methodology usually produces good results, but never amazing ones, especially in competitive industries. There is a flip side however; established websites that do perform well but are looking for extras long tailed traffic and ranking boosts can see great results from the simplest content strategies. So what is a content strategy? Well it’s kind of in the title, create good relevant content based on reliable keyword research and you’ll see vast amounts of new traffic and improved performances in your existing targeted keywords. A simple way to do this always lies in your keyword research, you have to find opportunities in keywords that are not directly related to your industry but are reasonably related. For example, if you own a websites that sells cars you look at what areas can provide your user with added value. So perhaps you would research the keyword “tyres”, “makes of tyres”, “most popular tyres” and so on. The content alone has to obviously be unique and provide reasonable value to your website and user/customer so be careful how you acquire it. Cheap content writers usually recycle a lot of old news and articles so unfortunately you get what you pay for – $30 for 300 words is a reasonable price to expect to pay. For those of you who aren’t sure how you can check to see if the content you pay for is unique, just visit copyscape, enter the URL where the content is held and it will return all locations across the web where the content has been used before, if any. The important part of a content strategy is the housing and management of the content. Simply putting a page of content 2 or 3 levels down in your site architecture in an “articles” folder will not work. Wordpress is a great way of creating new and regular updates to a site but on this occasion i’m going to use a standard HTML folder. Here are some simple rules to abide by;

1. House the content in an appropriate folder i.e. mycars.com/tyre-information/ – include keywords in your folder name that accurately represent what’s included inside
2. Make sure the pages are accessible from your HTML sitemap, this is important to help the pages get indexed quicker
3. List the files in your XML version of the sitemap
4. Make the content area accessible from your main navigation too, this will add the extra layer of visibility to your content area and show the search engines it’s valuable enough to warrant a link from your main menu.

Now the content itself will help your website’s performance for a number of keywords depending on the number of pages you add per strategy. However if there are particular pages on your site you’d prefer to rank better than others then make sure you use this next tip. Link to your targeted internal page in each new section of content. So highlight a relevant keyword in each page and create your link in the body of the text, this will directly pass most of the value and page rank to the targeted internal URL, boosting rankings for your already existing page. The diagram below shows how the value is passed between your new and existing pages

As mentioned this is a very simple strategy that does work with established websites to get new long tailed traffic and to help increase current web rankings.

For those that are unfamiliar with Robots.txt, this is a text file that should sit in the root of your websites directory. The Robots.txt (RT) file controls what the search engines can look at and index throughout your website. It’s surprising how often I find clients not even aware that such a file exists. Is the RT file the responsibility of an SEO strategy or something much more?

First off I always recommend that clients have a RT file on their server, even if they want all their pages indexed, it’s just good practice to have this file in place. For me it’s the “I am being good” file, for spiders and search engines, I believe that having such a file in place you get a very miniscule amount of positive value. Based on my experience I have seen websites indexed quicker on a larger number of search engines versus websites that don’t use it.

For larger organisations multi channel marketing is often carried out covering PPC, SEO, Affiliate marketing and Direct Marketing. When such activity is carried out, the tendency for duplicate content and unfriendly landing pages is sometimes an issue. Not to mention when tracking you ideally want your data to be segmented into appropriate channels so mixing a combination can lead to unreliable results.

For example I am a strong believer in PPC landing pages and SEO landing pages being handled differently, essentially you are after the same goal; usually this is involves a conversion of some kind. PPC landing pages work best when kept short, including clear defined actions and some smooth looking graphics. SEO landing pages work best in rankings when there is sufficient content added to this formula. So where a RT file can help is that it can block off an entire directory from being indexed, meaning no content will be duplicated and the results captured will be from two separate marketing channels.

A great resource to learn more about Robots.txt files can be found at robotstxt.org

Some examples on the types of robots.txt files:

Allow everything to be crawled:

User-agent: *

Disallow:

To disallow everything from being indexed:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

To exclude specific folders from being crawled:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /PPC/

Disallow: /Affiliate/