The role domain names play in Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is sometimes overlooked. Domain names can help SEO campaigns in a few different ways, especially if they are relevant to the web site in question.

To some extent, search engines prefer sites with relevant domain names when determining which results should appear first. Although other factors can limit the SEO impact of a domain name containing relevant keyword(s), it will rank better in results for these words.

A domain name like nebraska-classifieds.info will help a web site rank higher for the search phrase “Nebraska classifieds”, compared to the classifieds page of a general site about Nebraska (or the Nebraska page of a classifieds site), particularly on MSN and Live Search.

However, the other sites may still outrank it if they have more inbound links or have been better optimized in other ways. Other forms of SEO and marketing in general cannot be neglected just because a site has a good name; some of the best domain names on the web have relatively poor traffic and search rankings.

Also, domain names may help SEO by encouraging searchers to click on search results based upon the URLs appearing below each listing. For example, people are more likely to visit and read an article about rotary engines at Cars.com than a similar page at AOL.com. Although this is not always true, searchers will consider the web site specialized to their subject of interest to be more knowledgeable about it than a site which is more general, or primarily about a different subject.

A short domain name can also make a web site appear more authoritative and credible to search engine users, especially if it has a .net, .org, or .edu extension. Some engines also allow users to restrict their searches to sites with a specific extension of their choice, although it is unclear how many people actually use this feature.

Brief, authoritative-sounding domain names help web sites in ways beyond SEO as well. People are more likely to link to them, use them as research sources, and type them into the browser address bar. Such names are also more memorable.

The visual attractiveness of search results and the rankings assigned by search engines are important parts of SEO. Short, relevant domain names help SEO efforts in both ways, making them a valuable component to any promotional campaign.

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.

Many people may not think of Firefox as an SEO tool, but in actuality, it’s a great one. It works well for SEO for many reasons. Among them are that it’s free, secure, works on Mac, Windows, and Linux with the same features and functionality and has a large developer network creating extension that are generally independent.

After you make the decision to use Firefox though, it can be overwhelming deciding which plugins you should use. To that end, here is a list of the 7 highly useful plugins and what you can use them for:

1. SEOQuake – This tool helps analyze search results and various parameters that may influence SEO such as Google PR (Google PageRank of current page), Google Index (Number of indexed pages. Google version), Google link (Number of links, pointed to the current page. Google version (Except links from concerned domain) as well as similar parameters for many other search engines (Yahoo, MNS, Yandex, Rambler, Baidu) and some other miscellaneous parameters.

2. SEOpen: Provides some basic tools to help with search engine optimization, including Google backlinks, yahoo backlinks, PageRank check, http header viewer, and more. All features are available by right-clicking on an open area of a web page, or by using the included toolbar. (Note: Not yet compatible with Firefox 3.0)

3. SEO Link Analysis: Adds display of PageRank, linktext and nofollow links to external links in Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo! Site Explorer and Microsoft Webmaster Portal.

4. Mahalo Share: Share and recommend Web pages across many different services; recommend a link once and have it automatically posted to any of Twitter, del.icio.us, MySpace, Ma.gnolia, Jaiku, your Tumblr blog, Facebook, Pownce, StumbleUpon, Mahalo, Faves, or Google Bookmarks.

5. SearchStatus: Display the Google PageRank, Alexa rank and Compete ranking anywhere in your browser, along with fast keyword density analyser, keyword/nofollow highlighting, backward/related links, Alexa info and more.

6. RankQuest SEO Toolbar: RankQuest SEO(Search Engine Optimization) Toolbar provides you quick access to more than 30 intuitive SEO tools. Alexa Rank and Page Rank provided by Alexa and Google respectively ensure the popularity of the site. Once you download and install the SEO Toolbar you are only one or two clicks away from carrying out most of your day to day SEO operations.

7. About This Site: One-click access to web site metadata - traffic, related and linked pages, and more - added to the Tools menu and context menu.

Google’s Insight for Search program is closely related to their Google Trends product. With Insights for Search you can compare and contrast search volume patterns across specified regions (like USA or Japan), categories (such as health or sports) and time ranges (last 30 days, for example).

No matter what business you’re in – small business owner, marketing/advertising agency or even a giant corporation – Google Insights for Search can help you determine the interest in different search terms. The reason is that Insight for Search shows you A/B comparison between keywords so that you can choose the best keywords for your needs. It also shows you the top related keywords as well as which keywords are on the rise in your market. Additionally, you can see which cites, states and even countries in which a keyword is popular.

A note of caution, Google Insights for Search works much like Google Trends in that it defaults to the broad matched version of a keyword. This means that a word like credit will show more volume than credit cards, event though credit cards gets more search volume. The reason is that the term credit card counts towards the search volume for the word credit. Also good to know, keywords are weighted so that their top volume day is anchored at 100 and other days represent a relative percentage of that search volume.

All in all, this is another powerful tool in Google’s toolbox that is well worth taking a look at to determine how it can fit into your marketing plan.

It’s no secret that companies around the world are competing for the top places in search engine results. It’s also no secret that the reasoning behind this is that the closer you are to the top, the more traffic your site will receive and, hopefully, the more revenue your company will generate.

Since most search engines only allow natural results, or non-paid results, at the top of their lists SEO companies are stepping in to help businesses reach those coveted spots. Through SEO techniques these SEO marketing companies can help their clients climb higher and higher in the results page, eventually landing on the first page of a search query.

While many of these companies will simply charge customers a flat rate for their services, RankPay has come up with a different plan. They don’t charge any upfront fees, but they do have an up-front pricing schedule. Their theory however, is if you don’t rank you don’t pay. Then, once you rank, the amount you pay is based upon the ranking that has been established. This amount is the up-front pricing schedule that was determined before the SEO process began.

RankPay can be used for any sized web site, but they will not optimize more than one web site per keyword. Additionally they don’t accept all sites and/or keywords so you’ll have to see if you qualify to use their services. Once your rankings have been achieved your business will be billed monthly. And you always have the option to deactivate terms from your keyword list at any time.

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.

Google supports query words that have special meaning to Google. These are known as advanced operators and modify a search in some way or tell Google to do a different type of search. Quite a few of these operators use punctuation instead of words and quite a few of them are accessible from the Advanced Search page of Google. Here is a list of the more common types and what they do.

1. link: Using the query [link:www.webpage.com] will list web pages that have links to the web page you specify. Make sure you do not put a space between the “link:” and the web page URL.
2. related: The query [related:www.webpage.com] will list web sites that are similar to the web page you specified. Again, you cannot leave a space between the colon and the web site specified.
3. site: This query [site:www.webpage.com] allows Google to restrict the results to the web sites in the given domain.
4. allintitle: This query [allintitle:example search] restricts the search results to ones with all of the query words in the title.
5. intitle: [intitle:example search] restricts the results to documents containing the word you search for in the title.
6. allinurl: [allinurl:example search] limits the results to ones will all of the query words in the URL. This query works on words only and not URL components.
7. inurl: [inurl:example search] confines the search results to documents containing that word in the URL.

Keep in mind there can be no space between the colon and the first word in any of these queries. Using these advanced Google searches as well as the additional ones found on Google can help you with your search engine optimization