The domain name you choose is very important for the success of your website. If you are serious about your online presence it is recommended that you come up with a nice name for your site and not settle with a free hosting service that is long and cumbersome to remember and recall.

There are a lot of benefits of having your own domain name. Listed below are a few of the most important ones:

• Having a personal domain name will enable having an address like http://www.yourcompany.com. On the other hand, a free domain name comes with http://www.freewebsite.com/yoursite; this is longer and harder for your customers to remember.
• Having your own domain name also builds up trust and credibility amongst your clients as they feel more comfortable and secure in the fact that it is an established company.
• With your own domain names come multiple emails at your domain that can be assigned to various functions of the site thus enabling flexibility and easy handling of customer requests.
• The home pages of a particular domain come up easily in internet searches as against those that are hosted on a free server. The index.html should be your own domain name to come up when a key word strikes!
• Some search engines will not be able to crawl down the sites that are hosted with free services. More often than not error messages like, ‘too many pages submitted’, ‘your URL is submitted for processing’ and other error crop up when you are trying to access these sites.

Other considerations before you decide upon a good domain name are as listed below:

• Size of Your Domain Name: Size is a very important factor in deciding your domain name – the smaller the better. Your visitors will easily remember a website name that is shorter and difficult to misspell.
• Easy to Remember Names: Most successful websites have easy to remember names like the ones you come across in your day to day life. Pick and choose the simplest one.
• Domain Names Need to Be Business Related: Domain names that are related to the product you are selling are always very useful. Try getting the product name as your domain name. An example would if you are selling arthritis shoes get a domain name like xyzarthritishoes.com.
• Competitors Domains: Always avoid picking names that are closely related to your competitors’ sites. Lest you lose your customers to them due to the confusing and similar names.
• Go For the .com! : People are used to the .com version much more than any thing else. Make .com your first choice of address. It is simple and more natural and people might just be able to find you on the net by typing in your brand’s name followed by the inevitable .com.

It is beneficial to start taking SEO into consideration even while a web site is still under construction and other types of promotion have yet to begin. Here are a few tips on how to begin applying SEO during this process…

1. As soon as possible, complete, optimize, and make available the smallest portion of the site which is useful. For example, upload just the home page and ordering page first, but include a notice that more information is under construction. This way, search engines will find and index the site earlier, but your non-SEO promotional efforts can wait until all construction has been finished. Then you can have a “grand opening” (perhaps using a press release) to show users all that your site has to offer. Keep in mind that it typically takes months after a website is first indexed in Google before it has a chance of gaining high search result positions there.

2. Work on SEO keyword targeting, META tag creation, and search engine “spider” accessibility while the site is under construction, not later. This will save time when you don’t have to rewrite or update pages for SEO in the future. Be sure to incorporate a Site Map into your design. It is also good to learn about proper internet promotional techniques during this process, so you aren’t deceived into applying any detrimental practices like posting to FFA pages or trading links with completely unrelated web sites. Don’t hurry to finish all of the pages immediately or to start promoting the site in any way possible.

3. Don’t submit the incomplete site to directories or try reciprocal linking until it has been finished. Otherwise, the operators of directories or other sites will be less likely to find your site impressive enough to link to, and your chance to be listed will probably be lost. However, it is generally acceptable to send free link submissions to major directories which take months to approve them, as long as the construction process is expected to finish in under a month. Make a list of any directories you submit to, as it can be difficult to remember, and it’s best not to submit to the same directory more than once.

Following these SEO tips will help your site attain higher rankings in search results at an earlier date, with fewer changes needed when it is no longer under construction. This will also prevent mistakes which could undermine the site’s success.

Perhaps you have made some efforts to improve the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) of your web site, but it isn’t working well and you still aren’t receiving much search traffic.

Here are a few potential reasons why your SEO isn’t working.

1. Outdated Methods – The effectiveness of different techniques changes from year to year, and some are no longer useful. You should consider researching newer methods of conducting SEO if your techniques include things like putting a hundred different words in the “keywords” META tag, purchasing links on pages that aren’t related to your site in any way, or commenting on blogs that now use the “nofollow” attribute. Certain outdated techniques, like putting a long list of keywords at the end of the page (typically in a very small font) or posting to FFA (Free For All) link pages, can actually worsen a site’s position in search results instead of improving it.

2. Not Enough Time -Even if your techniques are correct, another one of the reasons why your SEO campaign may not be working is because you don’t spend enough time on it. SEO shouldn’t be viewed as an afterthought; efforts to design and create content for a web site are wasted if it receives little or no traffic. There are numerous important tasks associated with SEO; optimizing URLs and META tags, obtaining inbound links, researching keywords, improving keyword density, submitting to directories, creating a site map, and so on. Many companies pay marketing firms to carry out SEO work, thus saving time and ensuring that effective techniques are applied.

3. Too Impatient – One of the reasons why your SEO efforts might seem not to be working is that you haven’t waited long enough to see an effect. Search engines need to index pages, find new links, update rankings, and so on – which doesn’t happen immediately. It typically takes longer (especially for new web sites) to see results from SEO on Google than MSN, Live.com, or GigaBlast. Submitting a new site to the major engines can help expedite the results a bit. If it is your goal to start receiving traffic immediately, consider using a different promotional method like PPC (Pay-Per-Click) or paid inclusion until your SEO campaign starts working effectively.

After identifying and responding to the reasons why your SEO isn’t working, you will have a better chance of achieving high rankings in search results and gaining more traffic to your web site.  If you would like a professional review of your website, check out our Website SEO Audit service.

There are lots of different tools online that provide quick data regarding websites, two sites that we use are Quarkbase and Website Grader.  Here is a quick overview of Mortgage101.com using both tools along with some interpretation of the information found by the tools.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) involves numerous terms and acronyms that many people are unfamiliar with. Some of them are also used with regard to internet marketing in general. The following SEO Cheat Sheet briefly explains each of the important terms’ meanings.

ALT Tag: Usually applied to graphics; text-only browsers and search engine spiders/robots see these tags instead of the images they are associated with.

Backlinks: These are simply external links from other web sites and blogs that link to the site in question. Some sites have free backlink-checking features.

Black Hat: Manipulative SEO techniques which try to cheat search engines and competitors by artificially making pages appear relevant to certain unrelated keywords.

Blogroll: This is a list of links to other blogs/sites which appears in the left or right sidebar of many blogs. Getting listed is good for SEO.

CTR: Click Through Rate. This is the percentage of internet users who click on a particular link or another type of online advertisement.

FFA: Free For All link pages. Although these may have had some SEO benefit many years ago, using them can severely harm search engine rankings.

Keyword Density: How often keywords appear throughout a page. Search engines may penalize attempts to cheat, such as putting a long list of keywords at the end.

Link Bait: Such “bait” is a web page that uses a title and/or content which “baits” other sites to link to it. It is very desirable for SEO.

META Tags: This refers to the keyword, description, and title tags used by many web pages. They affect how search engine results appear.

NoFollow: The “nofollow” tag/attribute, when added to a link, prevents the site being linked to from receiving (or losing) any SEO benefit.

PageRank (PR): A ranking system used by Google, which affects how close to the top of Google search and directory results a web site will appear.

Robots/Spiders: Automated computers which explore the WWW, looking for new pages and collecting information for the search engines to index.

Sandbox: A theory that Google puts new web sites at a significant disadvantage in search results for months after they are indexed.

SEM: This acronym refers to Search Engine Marketing, which encompasses SEO, paid inclusion, and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.

Site Map: A page on a web site which links to all of the other pages. This makes it easier for “spiders” to find and index them.

See our other entries for more details on each of the terms listed in this SEO Cheat Sheet, and consider printing out this page for future reference.