Search Engine Optimisation
How Domain Names Affect SEO
One of the most common types of question we receive is about domain names and how they affect SEO. While your domain name is, in most cases, the least important part of a top SEO ranking here are answers to the most common questions about domain names:
Should I buy a domain name that includes a keyword in it?
Having keywords in your domain name only makes a difference to your SEO when your domain name is the exact-match keyword that you want to rank for AND is the .com or local .com version (eg .com.au) of the keyword. Two examples of this are homeloans.com.au and travelinsurance.com.au, which both rank at the top of Google for those exact keyword phrases, which are highly searched for.
It’s important to note that using any other keywords in the domain name will negate the ranking benefit of having the keyword in the domain name. For example, mytravelinsurance.com.au will not have the same ranking effect for ‘travel insurance’ as travelinsurance.com.au but it will rank for ‘my travel insurance’.
Additionally, having a .net, .biz or any other extension apart from the .com version will not assist with your SEO rankings – you must have the .com or localised .com version (eg .com.au) of the domain name to rank highly for that keyword.
How to Write Effective SEO Articles for Your Blog
With the recent release of Google Caffeine, frequently updating informative, quality content to your website has never been more important. Regularly adding fresh content effectively increases not only the visibility of your website, but also assists with boosting your natural search engine rankings.
A perfect way to take advantage of this is to utilise a blog on your website and upload articles on a regular basis. This enhances the authority of your website and plays a major role in achieving top rankings for competitive keyword phrases. However, sometimes the hardest part of initiating the article writing process is gaining the inspiration or the article idea to start the ball rolling. Here are some article development and writing tips to make the process easier.
Creating Your Article Topic
The first task when writing an SEO article for your blog is to identify a high impact article topic. It is best to make your article topic short, snappy and appealing. Here are some ideas for topics ideal for your blog:
10 SEO Strategies for Google Caffeine
In my last article I spoke about how Google Caffeine will affect SEO. In this article I share 10 SEO strategies that align with Google Caffeine to increase your SEO rankings.
1. Make Your Site Larger
Google Caffeine places a greater importance on the authority of your domain. The easiest way to increase the authority of your domain is to make your site larger. The larger your site, the more PageRank you will control and the more authority your domain will have.
2. Post Articles To A Blog On Your Site
Adding articles to a blog on your site is not only a great way of increasing the size of your site, it’s also one of the best ways to keep your site fresh in the eyes of Google. Caffeine is all about finding the freshest and most relevant content on the web and presenting it to its users, and posting articles to your blog aligns perfectly with this.
How Will Google Caffeine Affect SEO?
There has been a lot of buzz in the SEO industry with the formal launch of Google’s new indexing system Google Caffeine. Many of our clients are interested in how Google Caffeine will potentially affect their SEO. Here are some insights…
An Overview of Google Caffeine
Google Caffeine is not a change in how Google ranks websites – it is a change in how it indexes and then presents new information online. Rather than taking a few weeks to browse the web and then update its index (ie what you see when you conduct a search) it can update its index as soon as it finds a new piece of information. Caffeine was developed to improve the speed, relevancy, size and comprehensiveness of Google’s search.
SEO Will Be Picked Up Faster
As Google is able to index content faster, any SEO activities being implemented will have a faster impact on SEO rankings. So rather than waiting for weeks for SEO activities to be seen by Google you can expect them to be picked up almost straight away.
It’s important to note that the current ranking factors still exist but the work done to improve SEO rankings will take effect faster.
7 Website Optimization Tips For Top SEO Rankings
Achieving top SEO rankings for a profitable keyword phrase requires a link building strategy designed to get other websites to link to you with the keywords you want to rank for within the links. While on-site SEO only plays a small part in your overall SEO ranking success, a well optimized website can significantly reduce the amount of link building you need to implement to achieve top SEO rankings.
Here are 7 website optimization tips for top SEO rankings on Google…
1. Optimize Your Title Tags – your title tags are the words that appear as the first line (ie your headline) in your Google search results. Title tags are one of the elements used by Google to determine what a particular web page is about so you must ensure that the keywords you want to rank for are located within the title tags. Keep in mind that people read your title tags and make a decision on whether to click through to your website or not, so make sure it reads well for humans. Limiting your title tags to 60 characters will ensure that all of the words you use are visible in the search results pages.
