Your web address (Part 1) How to choose a website domain name

December 27, 2007 | 1 Comment

Getting started with a website begins with your address. The magical set of letters and numbers that all start with “http://” that allow users to find YOU on the internet. The process of choosing the right domain name should be carefully considered when you’re starting and marketing a new website. Especially if SEO is going to be one of your main vehicles for driving traffic to your new site. Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under Internet Marketing 

Notes on the 22 Immutable laws of marketing

December 21, 2007 | Leave a Comment

For those of you that are interested in learning about basic marketing principles I’d like to recommend The 22 Immutable laws of marketing by Al Ries and Jack Trout. This is not a book review, this is just a summary of some of the points that the authors cover in the book. I thought it might be a good resource to scan if you need a refresher from time to time. Maybe you’ll gain a little nugget of information that will help you expand your marketing ideas and techniques online. Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under Internet Marketing 

The end of the supplemental index?

December 20, 2007 | Leave a Comment

For those of you not familiar with the Google supplemental index, I found the best ever summary of this indice (In´dice - n. 1. Index) at Tropical SEO to sum up what this is. Quote: “The Google Supplemental index is the Siberian work camp for web pages.” I find that statement hilarious and I laughed out loud.

In the past, if you’re website had pages that Google didn’t trust or had a lot of inlinks that were suspect, Google would place your pages in a huge, dark, dusty database where you would technically be “indexed” and could “possibly” show in the search results, but the chances were slim. The official Google statement on this subject was that they would search this index if and when they had to fulfill a harder or more esoteric (obscure) search query. Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO News and Tidbits 

Starting and marketing a new business online

December 17, 2007 | 1 Comment

By Chris Auman

For those intrepid, brave souls who just started a business or recently moved to the web you might be wondering where you should start? How do you get customers to your website and make money? The internet is a vast imbroglio; a complicated maze of digital wonderment. How can someone find little ol’ me in the endless maze of the web? In essence you are the smallest needle in the world’s largest haystack. Welcome to the wild, wonderful world of starting and promoting a business on the internet. Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO Training 

Google Analytics: Content Analysis and Sitemap improvements

December 14, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Google has released an update to their much loved Analytics tool that provides basic content analysis and another improved feature that details out important information about your sitemap. The new tools will give you information about meta tags, meta description tags and information about content on your site that Google has trouble indexing. Google says:

To help you improve the quality of your site, our new content analysis feature should be a helpful addition to the crawl error diagnostics already provided in Webmaster Tools.

The new sitemap tools reveal how your sitemap was processed by the Googlebot and it should be a useful addition so you don’t have to spend the time trying to figure out if Google actually indexed all of your important pages.  Information includes:

  • The number of the pages from your Sitemap that were indexed
  • lists any errors or warnings for specific pages

Google continues:

Sitemaps are an excellent way to tell Google about your site’s most important pages, especially if you have new or updated content that we may not know about. If you haven’t yet submitted a Sitemap or have questions about the process, visit our Webmaster Help Center to learn more.


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO News and Tidbits 

20 New (and old) ideas for driving targeted traffic to your LOCAL site

December 14, 2007 | Leave a Comment

Driving real traffic to your site these days is a never ending battle that most people think is beyond their reach if they don’t spend thousands of dollars on search engine optimization or further fill the pot of gold that Google is building with their pay-per-click Adsense program. Obviously these techniques should be a cornerstone of your online marketing program. But there are many more affordable techniques that can help you drive traffic and all it takes is a little elbow grease and maybe a few extra bucks. I’m not talking about just any traffic though. What we want is local, targeted website traffic that drives real clients and customers to your local website and your local business. Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO Training 

SEO Design: Navigation

December 13, 2007 | 2 Comments

Continuing our discussion of search engine friendly design considerations I offer you part 3 of a 6 part series on SEO friendly design and the important design aspects of website construction and how these practices relate to the subject of SEO.

Use text and css for navigation whenever possible.

Search engines love clear, keyword rich, text links. There is nothing more certain in the universe.

The second most certain thing is that designers like to create visually rich navigation schemes out of images. This is a mistake if you do it the wrong way. Your site navigation is a very important part of how search engines and users get around the site so you should make it extremely easy for them. Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO Training 

Hyphenated domain names are BAD

December 12, 2007 | 5 Comments

For those not familiar with this subject, let me give you a quick background summary.

Domain names can be purchased as “yourdomainname.com” or “your-domain-name.com” and you don’t automatically get both when making the purchase. Site owners have chosen to market their site this way for several reasons.

First, the domain name without the hyphens might not be available so the site owner opts to go with the next best thing.

Second, people have chosen to go this route to clearly place their specific keywords and key phrases in their domain name and separate them with hyphens to clearly spell out the words for the search engines. It’s not a bad idea to have your keywords in your domain name but the goal here is to target a very specific, high traffic key phrase and the practice has been abused. This technique has been popular for long, targeted key phrases that are commonly used by shady, spammy and illegal sites. For example, “buy-viagra-online-cheap.com”.

Google has said in 2005 that it doesn’t matter if you have hyphens but does this still stand up in 2008?

To answer a common question, Google doesn’t algorithmically penalize for dashes in the url. Of course I can only speak for Google, not other search engines. And bear in mind that if your domain looks like www.buy-cheap-viagra-online-while- consolidating-your-debt-so-you-can-play-texas- holdem-while-watching-porn.com, that may still attract attention for other reasons.

In 2008 it’s becoming clear that the search engines might be starting to consider domain names like this to be less relevant and spammy than domain names without the hyphen. Many prominent figures in the industry have said that more than 3 hyphens in a domain name can raise a red flag.

We’ll keep an eye on this subject and we welcome your participation in the comments below. As a general practice try to choose a domain name without hyphens. It’s easier to remember and it reduces the risk that you might rate with lower relevance in the SERP’s due to your domain name style. Of course there is nothing wrong with securing your domain name with and without the hyphens to reduce confusion but I would definitely recommend using the non-hyphenated name whenever possible.

Where’s a good place to register domain names? Check out GoDaddy.com and NameBargain.com


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO News and Tidbits 

Your content structure and organization

December 11, 2007 | Leave a Comment

I’ve wondered for a long time regarding the choice of some sites to build their content out within directories, sub-domains or as static pages positioned at the top of the root directory. I’ve always had it in my mind that the static page (or at least a short path to the page) is the way to go - that Google would consider that page “more relevant” because it was higher up in the directory. The answer turns out to be none of the above. To the best of my knowledge neither one has an advantage for crawling/indexing first. Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO News and Tidbits 

Link building (Part 1) The Basics

December 10, 2007 | 2 Comments

Well, here we go. How do we tackle the most intensive and time consuming part of any SEO job? Just like any other job, the best way is to just hunker down, roll up your sleeves and take it step by step, bit by bit until you’ve completed the job - no matter how long it takes and how much you sweat. Hopefully in the end it will all be worth it. If you know what your goals are and where you need to go, simple focus, organization and sheer power of will will always get the job completed.

Building and managing a high quality link campaign will take exactly this commitment. It’s not something that you can just dive into without a plan and a system for organization. Actually, besides the knowledge of how to build a high quality and honest link campaign, organization is the most important part. We’ll discuss this more on this site as we progress but know this up front, if you start building links without the proper knowledge and a proper system, you’ll almost always assuredly fail. Read more


Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO Training 

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