This week we will be covering about how to SEO your blog. I know for many, the phrase “search engine optimization” means something unrealistically hard, but in reality, its not what it is at all. I remember a while back when I was first confronted with this idea of optimizing your web site, I was confused every single time I read about it. This week I’ll put SEO into a language you can understand. For today, I’ll highlight some basics of SEO that we will be going over:

What is SEO?

SEO, as I mentioned above, is search engine optimization. This basically means that you will be making your blog or website “Google-Efficient” and by that I mean, making it easier and better for sites like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, and others to browse your site and then return your results on the front page. That’s the key here; we want to see our be one of the first ones to pop up when a person searches Google or a related site.

More Confusing Terms Defined:

Directory Submissions: Nothing hard about this. All you’re doing is going to various sites, filling out a form that will add your site to theirs.

Keyword Research: All this means is that when a person searches certain words, such as “cheap designers” your site will come up on top. For this, you need to check out a few tools that will help you pick out other “keywords” that will help you achieve this.

Keyword Density: Another phrase dealing with those words you want to represent your site. Density is simply a ratio of how many keywords you have per say 100 words. So if you have 5 keywords in every 100 words, your density would be 5 (percent).

Meta Tags, Meta Analysis: Meta is simply text that is placed in the top of your web page that tells the search engines what your page is about. There’s all kinds of fancy tools for meta analysis, how to put in correct words, etc. but all we need is one lesson that will be sufficient in achieving this.

Backlinks: Backlinks are links that link back to your site. The more sites you have that link about your sites the better right?

Link Popularity: This is almost the same as backlinks except these are actually calculations on which sites link to your site. Not all backlinks are created equal therefore you want good sites to link to you. More about that later on in our course.

No-Follow, Do-Follow: Search engines use programs called “robots” or “spiders” that visit websites and gather the information you have. You can tell a robot whether or not it can proceed to another link or not. If the link has a “do-follow” tag attached to it, the robot will go on that link and check it out. If it has a “no-follow” tag, then it won’t.

Pagerank: Should be something everyone knows about. Its how Google ranks webpages. You can have a minimum rank of 0, or a maximum of 10 (in reality its more of a 9 since there’s not many sites that have gotten a 10). If you want to see your pagerank in action, visit RealPRCheck.com

Alexa Rank: Your Alexa rank is determined by how much traffic you have. The more traffic you have, the lower the rank number i.e. if your Alexa is 1, you’re the most visited site in the world. If its 1,000,000, you’re nowhere close to being the most visited site.

DMOZ: dmoz is a website directory like we talked about earlier except all of its websites are handpicked into their directory. Search engines such as Ask.com, Yahoo, and others use that information to fill up their databases, so if you’ve been dmoz approved, you have a better change at getting ranked into a lot of search engines.

That’s it for now, if there’s more that I’ll need to add later on, I’ll cerainly will and be sure to subscribe or bookmark for more detailed lessons.

Popularity: 7% [?]

Most of you readers might be thinking, why am I even writing on a topic like this? Choosing a domain name should be a no-brainer. But in reality, many people choose a domain name without thinking too much about what they’re choosing. Here are some important tips to consider in order to have an effective domain name.

1. Choose a plausible name - This is very important. Don’t choose a domain name “mrchaverskewysflowerwebsite.com”. Instead choose something shorter, nicer, and easy to remember like “greatflowertips.com”.
2. Choose a domain that reflects your site – This might sound obvious, but surprisingly, there are domains that have no obvious reflection of the site. So if you’re going to make a website about cars, make sure the domain has something to do with cars.
3. Keep it short – “mrchaverskewysflowerwebsite.com” is not an example of a short and sweet domain. If you want search engines to pickup your domain, limit the name to under 55 characters. But my recommendation would be to keep it under 15-20 characters unless you have two long words that sound plausible like “bloggingunderground.com”.
4. Dashes/Hyphens – This is a question that is frequently asked. Should I use dashes in my domain name. When it comes to search engine rankings, dashes help domain names due to the alphanumeric hierarchy search engines use to rank domain names, so if you want traffic to come mostly from search engines, that’s something to consider. Perhaps you can register two domain names, one with hyphens, one with out. Dashes also help search engines break down keywords. However, as my own preference, for a professional site, I would register without dashes because it looks neater and dashes can throw off some visitors.
5. .COM/.NET/.ORG/etc… Which domain extension should I register with? .COM domain names are valued more than other names and are more commonly used than any other domain. However, this does not mean you should get a .COM. If you’re operating in Russia and you sell furniture, you probably want to get a .ru domain. But if you want to register a normal English site, think about what it will be used for. Some names sound better with a .org extension, others with a .net. Take for example my company site, AlloraWeb.net. When I was choosing my domain name, I decided to market it as .NET because it sounded better. But this is not to say that I did not register a .COM. I registered a .COM as well for the following reason. When a person types in say AlloraWeb into their browser without typing in an extension, they will be directed immediately to AlloraWeb.com. If you do not own that domain name, then you’re basically sending visitors to a competitor’s website. So if possible, try to own the .COM name.

In summary, I would like to say choose a domain name that sounds good, has good keywords, and is easy to remember. When I was registering my college book swap website, I went through several domain names before I settled in on the right one. First I registered coedexchange.com and coed-exchange.com. Then I changed it to classmatechannel.com, and finally I settled in on classmateswap.com.

On a final note, I read often how authors will write “a domain name will cost you about $40-$50 per year”. I will say this: a .com domain name is going to cost you $5.99 per year. Visit name.com for details. TLD domain name registrations cost no more than $10 per year and if you run across one that does, just ask me and I’ll give you another company to register with.

Popularity: 12% [?]