The Complete Guide to Choosing a URL, part 2

March 3, 2010 – 9:19 am

The choice of whether to use your company name, or your SEO keywords in your domain name is perhaps the most universal. Last week we looked at a few ways to solve it, as well as best practices for choosing an extension. For some of you, one post will have solved all of your problems – lucky! Today we a re looking at less universal, but still common issues in choosing a domain name.

SEO

Text Speak in Domain Names

Using the number 2 instead of the word ‘to’, the number 4 instead of the word ‘for’, etc is a great way to create a snappy-looking domain. In reality, though, they’re a pain in the backside. Every time you spell your domain out for somebody, you’ll have to say ‘number-4′, or ‘letter-U’. It’s very clunky.

An additional problem is that to experienced web users, these domains look a little sleazy … and often akin to virus-laden or spam-creating sites. Not very professional.

The hyphen – hot or not?

Last week we teased you with a few funny domain name examples that could easily have been saved with hyphens … Pen Island could have rescued their site www.penisland.net with nothing but a little dash, and so could www.expertsexchange.com. Hyphens are sometimes strongly recommended!

However, when you have a full business name in your URL, hyphens just add to the length. Also, they aren’t part of many computer users’ ‘defaults’ – if someone can’t remember your website, they are unlikely to try with hyphens between the words. Only use in cases of hilarious misunderstanding.

Should I use a business acronym?

Many businesses are known both by their staff and clients as an acronym of their proper name – for example, NAB for the National Australia Bank. Should you use the acronym as your domain name, though?

It all depends on how commonly you use your full name, or your acronym. Full names may have a little advantage in terms of SEO (giving the search engines keywords to feed off), but if your customers are more likely to search for ‘www.nab.com.au’ than ‘www.nationalaustraliabank.com.au’, you should make things easier for the humans whenever possible.

Buying an existing domain

Sometimes you’ll have the opportunity to buy an existing domain name that fits your business. They cost A LOT compared to getting a new domain, but sometimes have quite a bit of money invested in them, in terms of SEO. Have a web marketing expert check on the domain’s Google performance – if it has a good SEO basis, it might be worth the extra expense.

By Lucy | Posted in Online Marketing, SEO | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

The Complete Guide to Choosing a URL, part 1

February 24, 2010 – 9:03 am

There are some pretty … um … amazing URLs out there. Sites like www.therapistfinder.com and www.powergenitalia.com are prime examples of why you should always take time over your decisions about a URL! It isn’t just inadvertent and very unfortunate word mashups that you need to be aware of, though. Your URL is one of the most important determinants of web marketing success. Today we begin our ultimate guide to choosing a URL for your business website.

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Selecting your domain extension

The most recognizable extension is the dot com, although most users will also try your country code extension if they can’t find your site immediately. It is always worth registering a dot com, and a dot com dot AU, or CA, or TH, or whatever the case may be… even if you intend to use .org or .net as your primary website. Otherwise, people who don’t remember your address properly might land at a competitor’s website at the .com, instead of yours.

If you will be serving international visitors on your site, a simple .com extension makes the most sense – having a country code could scare away some visitors who believe that you don’t deliver or serve global customers. If you purchase both, you can direct interntional visitors to your .com, and local visitors to your .com.au site. You can be a global business, but still inspire local confidence.

Using your business name

Using nothing other than your business name as your URL is simple, and will help people that are trying to find you for the first time. However, it is not always the best SEO strategy. If your business name contains no indication of what you actually do, you are missing out on the most valuable element in the Google algorithm.

Using your keywords as your URL

While using your keywords as your URL is ideal for SEO, it carries its own set of problems. Users often expect businesses to be named after their URLs (or the other way round!), and may mistrust a site where this doesn’t ‘add up’.

Solving the dilemma – three strategies

Obviously, there is a dilemma to deal with when deciding whether to go with your business name or keywords for your URL. Here are a few possible solutions:

  • Use your business name PLUS your keywords, if it doesn’t make the URL too long
  • Use your keywords and your businesses initials only
  • Change your business name to include your keywords, if you’ll be primarily web-based

Next week we’ll look at some of the less pressing, but still common problems in domain name selection!

By Lucy | Posted in Online Marketing, SEO | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Web Marketing Tools for Beginners: Crowd Science

February 17, 2010 – 9:05 pm

Marketing to a particular demographic is perhaps one of the most powerful tools in a web marketer and SEO specialist’s arsenal. When you know who you are speaking to (in terms of sex, age, family status, earning power, financial decision-making capacity, etc), you know what they want. And when you know what someone wants, you can give it to them much more easily! Today we are looking at an external tool for understanding your audience better – Crowd Science.

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Demographics - power of the (knowledge of) the people

How Crowd Science works

Crowd Science delivers short surveys to visitors who are already on your site. It will pop up a survey invitation at a set point – perhaps after somebody has viewed three pages. They remain on your website while taking the survey, and might answer questions about:

  • Their demographics – sex, age, family status, geographic location, etc
  • What they think of the site currently
  • What they think the site needs
  • How easy they found a particular task on site

Not sleazy!

So often, market research on the internet is a very low-brow activity. Animated banners, ‘Free iPod!’ links and automatic sound abound. Crowd Science is a little classier than that. A simple pop-up appears in the middle of the screen, not much different to the email newsletter sign-up forms that you quite often come across on websites nowadays.

Personalizable features of Crowd Science

You can customize the Crowd Science experience for your own site, with features like:

  • Personalizable colours, invitations and text
  • Personalizable reporting
  • Tracking across multiple sites can be integrated

Non-intrusive

Use of cookies and scheduling ensures that your visitors shouldn’t be asked to do a survey more than once, and that only a small portion of visitors are asked to participate.

We do not make money from your use of Crowd Science, but do believe that their demographics information is one of the building blocks of a good web marketing campaign. Remember, knowledge is power!

By Lucy | Posted in Online Marketing | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

4 Beginner’s Methods for Using Social Media Marketing in Your Business

February 10, 2010 – 8:40 pm

Using social media in internet marketing can be pretty confusing for those who don’t spend a lot of time on the net. It requires quite a lot of finesse in the way you deal with customers, and a complete re-adjustment of your attitude from sales-focused and self-focused, to completely customer focused. More than that, though … most people simply don’t know where to start! These are some of the most common activities in the social media segment of an internet marketing strategy.

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A social network ;-)

Set up a Myspace profile

Myspace is far more commercially oriented than Facebook. There are spaces to offer music samples and downloads, and facilities to take orders for your products through the site. You are marketing in a normal way, just on a social media. Myspace is a relatively non-threatening way to get into social media marketing.

Start Tweeting

There are plenty of guides around the net about how to use Twitter for business purposes. Read a few of them, and start Tweeting. It is best to do a little research before you get into this regularly – follow some of the leaders in your industry and see how they use the service.

Start a Facebook page or group … and update it

Connect your company with people who like your products, and connect your customers with each other. The average Facebook user joins abouthte same number of groups per month that they leave … so give people a reason to keep following your page or your group. Wish them happy holidays, leave product updates, post news relevant to your product, etc.

Create content with a view to getting it Dugg

The easiest way to do this is to have someone do it for you – it is a fine art!  Once you have your content on your site, get a few of your friends to Digg it using their accounts, to get it going.

By Lucy | Posted in Online Marketing | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

4 Ways to Instantly Improve Your Website Copywriting

February 3, 2010 – 8:07 pm

Website copywriting can be difficult if you aren’t a natural-born writer. You know your products well and know what needs to be emphasized … but sometimes it just doesn’t come out properly! These tips for improving your website content (and therefore, web marketing) can be applied after the fact, and do not include any advice about taking writing classes!

Cut out the ‘be’s

Okay, you won’t be able to remove all of the ‘be’s from your writing – but odds are, many of them are superfluous. Look at the sentence: “I will be putting these up on the website next week”. You can change that quickly and easily to “I will put these … etc”, and retain the same meaning.

Given the fact that conciseness is of paramount importance on the web, this and the next tip are more useful than you might think!

Cut out ‘is’s

Clunky heading, I know :-) . Keep reading anyway. Often you can cut out ‘is’ from sentences quite easily, and chop out surrounding words along with this little seed of verbosity. You can either:

  • Shorten your full ‘is’s to contractions – ‘what is’ to ‘what’s’. Roughly the same characters, but easier for people to grasp.
  • Look for instances of ‘there is’, and rearrange the sentence to cut them out completely.
  • Look for other ‘is’s, and think about whether you can use other words to shorten the sentence. It’s usually possible.

When it comes to facts, don’t generalise

Here is a handy cheat-sheet of words to help you identify whether you are generalising. If you say:

  • Often
  • Many
  • Approximately
  • Can (as opposed to will)
  • Virtually

You are telling your audience there’s an exception to whatever you have just written. It’s like a legal loophole for getting out of having your product do what you implied it would. These aren’t forbidden words generally, but you shouldn’t use them when you are talking about facts.

Learn to love full stops

Any sentence that goes on for longer than 15-20 words is usually too long. Full stops are the best way to break up sentences, but not always possible. Use semicolons where you can, or simply cut out a part of the sentence that isn’t really necessary.

By Lucy | Posted in Online Marketing, SEO | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Marketing on a Budget – What Do I get for $100?

January 27, 2010 – 8:05 pm

Seeing ads in the sponsored results that say “1000s of unique visitors to your site only $99!”, or “Be #1 in Google for only $299, call today”? If you’ve seen this, you’re probably also noticing that when you get any indication of SEO services pricing over in the natural results, it is hundreds of times what the dodgy PPC ads tell you. Today we are looking at what the SEO industry’s top professionals would do to promote their websites if they only had $100, $250, or $500. Funnily enough, it doesn’t include buying traffic…

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Aaron Wall of SEObook would do things like…

  • Setting up an alternative source of income while he put himself through a self-paced study course, spending around $20 to $200 on books
  • Buy a cheap domain
  • Get cheap hosting
  • Start a Wordpress blog that included no ads whatsoever, and he was truly passionate about and involved in
  • Get a cheap logo
  • Use free keyword research and analytics tools

Once the site started making money, Aaron says he would reinvest in the growth of the site first.

Andy Hagans, author of Tropical SEO would do things like…

  • Buying good quality content
  • Buying good quality links

He has said he would spend his entire budget on this, no matter whether he had $100, $250 or $500. The ‘good links’ he indicated were joeant.com or botw.org for lower budgets, and the Yahoo Directory for slightly higher budgets. All leftover money would go to hiring writers for linkbait.

By the way, thanks go to SEOish for the SEO expert opinions in this post!

By Lucy | Posted in Online Marketing, SEO | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

The Dark Side of Linkbait

January 20, 2010 – 7:55 pm

Much as the pundits want you to believe it, linkbait is not all sunshine and roses! There is also a heap of manure at the bottom of that flower bush, helping those roses grow. Linkbait is a great SEO technique – it works in perfectly with what Google wants, and will always want. But it does have a dark side…

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Caught by linkbait

Linkbait for its own sake is worthless

Your linkbait content must support your overall internet marketing strategy, or it is almost worthless. The point of creating linkbait content is to get relevant links, pushing your site higher in Google’s estimation, and therefore presenting you earlier in the results when someone searches for your keywords. However:

  • If your linkbait content is not relevant to your core business, you will get few ‘qualified leads’ clicking through
  • If you encourage sites that aren’t relevant to yours to link to you, the worth of the links in Google’s algorithm is lowered.

So, you can’t just publish a controversial rant about Barack Obama as a linkbait strategy, if your company sells medical diagnostic equipment. You must think within the box!

Fake Linkbait could get you de-listed in Google

The best example is a story published at money.co.uk, titled ‘13 Year Old Steals Dad’s Credit Card to Buy Hookers’. This FAKE story got plenty of links … but it wasn’t made obvious on the page that it was fake. Matt cutts of Google indicated that the company would view that as dishonestly trying to create links (no matter what the writer’s intention), and could be added to the list of things that will get you banned from Google.

Linkbait’s ROI is unpredictable

This is the case with all activities in internet marketing – you must test and refine your techniques over time to be confident of getting a good return on investment. So just be cautious of investing a lot of money in linkbait content, without an *excellent* understanding of what makes the market tick.

By Lucy | Posted in SEO, link building | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

How To Become An Effective Internet Marketer- webmarketingexperts.com.au

September 16, 2009 – 12:24 am

Being an internet marketer brings about many challenges as far money making is concerned. You need to gear up and load yourself with advices from experienced online business people or else end up with sites that provide plain junk information. In order for your business to yield ROI, well established web marketing techniques must be administered otherwise you’ll end up getting frustrated and the next thing you know you are ready to quit.

Succeeding is possible when you know how to get things started. You can get through the tough competition of internet marketing and the best way to start promoting your goods and services online is through the acquisition of proper knowledge and training. There are plenty of online programs that promote effective marketing methods that every internet marketer must know. In choosing a suitable program, consider these tips and benefit from it along the way.

First, make sure that the site offers video training. These days, visual presentations are more preferred than written materials. Following something that is being done is easier to remember and that there is the benefit of restarting the whole video.

Second, the website must provide you with bits of information about article marketing. It is considered as one of the best means of online promotion. The site must also come up with valuable techniques on how to write efficient articles that entice potential buying customers.

Third, there must be information about affiliate marketing. See to it that the website guides you on how to find the best affiliate programs suitable for promotion.

Fourth, the site must provide good insights about social networking and its importance on your site’s online visibility with effective SEO.

Fifth, it must give you valuable information regarding pay per click marketing. It is one way of making money online. But once you jump on it right away, it can cost a lot of money.

And lastly, the program must give you ideas on what niches are making money. Promoting something that you are not knowledgeable about can lead to ineffective selling strategies.

Effective online promotion is more than just creating a unique web design. If you follow what the program teaches, then most probably you can end up as a good internet marketer. One thing to consider, persistence with patience is the key to mastery.

For more effective online marketing programs, visit www.webmarketingexperts.com.au.

By webmarketingexperts.com.au | Posted in webmarketingexperts.com.au | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Web Marketing Techniques For Online Success- webmarketingexperts.com.au

September 8, 2009 – 11:56 pm

A website is considered the most interesting tool in promoting products and services online. However, the tough challenge in the web hinder the opening of new channels necessary for enquiries and sales to occur. Here are some basic web marketing strategies that can help you achieve that internet marketer’s goal of online success.

•    Consider a good web design that speaks about your online business. Make sure that it embodies your company’s overall marketing collateral. In designing your site, always bear in mind that it must not look heavy and that it should load within 12 seconds-it’s the rule of thumb for web pages. As not everybody owning personal computers has the luxury of convenient broadband connections. So, pages with low speed load can never take their chance. Every viewer counts if it concerns your online business.

•    Create a good website content. It must include relevant and interesting information that are unique and original. As much as possible avoid the copy and paste technique as this will put your efforts into waste. Search engines hate plagiarism so most likely, by doing such, search engine spiders will just ignore your site. The chances of getting quality traffic may not be possible if that happens. In the business sense, you will experience loss instead of generating profits.

•    Optimize effective keywords in your pages but never overdo them. Keyword density also plays a vital role in the optimization process. Properly integrate the specific keywords that are relevant for your business only or else there is a chance that you will be misleading the viewers. Effective internet marketing creates trust with customers.

•    When things are done well with your design and content, it is now time to make your presence known over the internet. Your site’s online visibility can contribute a lot in the profit generation of your business through getting high search engine rankings. The more your online business is recognized by people and the search engines, the higher chances of getting that online success.

These things can be quite easy if you know the SEO techniques. However, if your time is limited, it is better that you consult the expert SEO. It is the best way to get things done.

For further queries about web marketing techniques, visit www.webmarketingexperts.com.au.

By webmarketingexperts.com.au | Posted in webmarketingexperts.com.au | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Boosting Sales Through Web Marketing – webmarketingexperts.com.au

September 4, 2009 – 12:31 am

Is it possible to generate business profit through web marketing?

Yes, it is very possible. In order to have the desired returns on investment, having an attractive web design would not be sufficient. You need to think of effective means on how to keep the business sales move up and not remain stagnant.

The advent of the internet has paved way to the more convenient means of doing online business. One way of making sales over the web market is through your website’s online visibility. In order to achieve your business’ bottom line, a well-designed website can be a good start. It is a fact that people buy the things that they can see. So by placing relevant information along with your offered products and services, possible sales can already take place.

However, in some cases, despite having the good looks, internet marketing does not seem to work. It is either that your website is not effective or you lack the necessary tactics in firing-off your business. In making your online business successful, it is suggested that you check its online visibility. If you are not satisfied with your site’s ranking then have your pages updated regularly. Make sure that it provides an interesting topic with good content that can catch the attention of the viewing public. Then, if possible, offer free trials for your product. People always look for more once they start to like something.

Another to thing to consider is having a subscription page. In the traditional way of selling products, the person doing the sales talk does not immediately jump into grabbing the customers’ neck in making them avail of the offered products or services. That is also how things are done with online advertising. As much as possible, create a positive impression so that people will get to like your products. And lastly, mode of payment must be made easy in order to provide convenience to your buying customers.

In order to appear in the search engines, you may need the assistance of an experienced SEO. They are more familiar with the means of getting you your targeted audience. When the business momentum is ignited, the potentials of your venture are then maximized.

For more ideas on how you can make profit from an optimized site, visit www.webmarketingexperts.com.au.

By webmarketingexperts.com.au | Posted in webmarketingexperts.com.au | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Marketing strategies at webmarketingexperts.com.au enable the majority of online businesses to keep up with the tough competition and attract qualified customers along the way. SEO can guarantee the success of your business and functions to assist in keeping the venture on track to reach its target crowd.
For more details on how your online business can profit from SEO, visit www.webmarketingexperts.com.au