Should you consider choosing a domain name with hyphens in it or is this really going to hurt your search engine results?
The reason many SEOers looked at using hyphenated domain names was that the primary keyword phrases, without spaces, had all but disappeared. For example, melbournerealestate.com may have gone but melbourne-real-estate.com may not have been taken. The hyphenated version was still very keyword loaded, so many SEOers saw it as a good option.
In my opinion, the use of hyphens can make the domain name look more spammy, so from a branding point of view, the domain name without the hyphens is a lot stronger. That said, I believe it’s a misconception that domain names with hyphens won’t rank as well as those without. Read More>>
So you’ve got your Google page ranking pretty high and you’re showing a lot of traffic to your website. Congratulations! Now – how do you know who these people are, and how are you going to market directly to them? It’s simple – you get them on your list.
Ask any internet marketer what the most important piece of their business is and they’ll tell you that it’s their list. Without a list you just have people visiting your website – and nothing more.
There’s a scene in Dude, Where’s My Car that makes me laugh every single time I watch it. The guys have just discovered they have new tattoos and go back and forth asking each other what theirs say. ”Dude.” “Sweet.” “Dude.” And on and on it goes. But when it comes to sales, one of the most important things to avoid is confusion.
People who are confused do not purchase anything, making it important to make sure that your customers are not confused. It’s a simple but important website conversion optimization tip.
This is not to say that you should not give them choices; rather, you want to make sure that their choices are laid out in a way that is clear and concise and where everything is easy to find.
An easy way to avoid this is to follow the “one page, one purpose” rule. Read More>>
If you’re like most people, you have spent a lot of time on your business, and you have probably spent a lot of time – and money – on your website. Choosing the colors, the layout, the formatting – these are all very important. But if you want people to find you easily, you need to rank high in search engines like Google. Here are a few things to keep in mind when you’re getting your page ready to go live.
Is SEO something you can do once, and once you have done it, you don’t have to think about it again? The simple and short answer is, “no”.
Remembering there’s two components to an SEO program – onpage and offpage. Onpage is all about having the right keyword in the right places on your site while off page optimization is all about building backlinks.
It’s true we’re looking to replicate what happens naturally as a site gains momentum and SEO will start to happen naturally, once you start to hit critical mass. However, Read More>>
There is a perception out there that linking out to high authority sites is a good website optimization strategy and will help your website perform better in the search engine rankings. Perhaps you’ve seen it where a website, down in the footer, will link to higher authority websites such as CNN or google.com. The SEOer or webmaster does this because they think it somehow increases their ranking.
Here at Melbourne SEO Services, we believe people are over exaggerating its effects. That is to say, in our testing, we haven’t seen it significantly affect rankings.
I think this myth may have arisen out of something Matt Cutts, from Google, talked about. He was asked the question, should you encourage people to post on your blog since you’ll potentially send links to other websites? Read More>>
In this day and age trust is a valuable commodity. It’s the one thing that can make people decide to spend their money with you and not with someone else, so you’ll want to make sure that your website builds the trust of your visitors. If they don’t trust you, they won’t buy from you.
There are tons of books, videos, courses, etc on how to build trust with your target audience, and I’ll touch on one of the most important ones here. Read More>>
I’m sure you’ve heard the old saying – “It’s the quality that matters, not the quantity.” Well who says that those things have to be mutually exclusive?
When you’re building your website and hoping to rank for a particular keyword, be sure you’re not too focused on just the one word. There are almost always going to be other keywords and phrases you can use for your search engine optimisation that you rank with in addition to your main keyword.
Since I started with an old saying, let’s use another – “Throw it all out there and we’ll see what sticks.” This is one of the tactics we sometimes use here at Melbourne SEO Services. We’ll do on-page optimisation for your website, and then see which of the keywords and phrases stand out from the others. By doing this, we can often find other ways of ranking – which means other ways of making money for you.
Here’s another – “Give even an onion graciously.” Okay, I don’t know what that one means, so let’s move on.
It definitely won’t hurt you to take a look at your website and see if there are other keywords or phrases that can help you rank. For more information on this and other SEO assistance, check out the DVD from our latest workshop.
Keyword with an 's' or without an 's'?... that is the question.
A question I’m often asked is whether to optimize for the singular or plural keyword phrase. Following on from that, should we create separate pages for the singular and plural versions of a keyword phrase, or should we create just the one page and target both terms?
For example let’s say you are going after the phrase “trading system”, what’s the best way to also achieve keyword ranking for “trading systems”? Read More>>
Have you ever heard about the idea of page rank sculpting and the use of ‘no follow’ to funnel page rank into those pages that you want to have ranked? It’s pretty high level SEO stuff, so if you’re not too sure what the hell I’m talking about Google “page rank sculpting” to find out a little more.
The basic idea is that you can increase your rankings in Google by channeling the page rank of your pages to the pages you want ranked. This used be done with the use of the ‘no follow’ tag. That said, things have changed, and Google has come out and said that the way ‘no follow’ used to work has changed. In short, using ‘no follow’ to channel that page rank juice is no longer as effective as it once was.
These days I don’t really worry about ‘no follow’. The way I do page rank sculpting is to simply Read More>>
