In the Beginning…

All great web ventures begin in one place, the search for the perfect name. As any marketer will tell you, a name needs to be easy to remember and effectively reflect your brand. This can be done in a variety of ways with domain names:

Memorable names may be clearly associated with the product/service you are selling. Good examples are www.mapquest.com, www.askjeeves.com, www.wikipedia.com, and www.eloan.com. These names are simple and convey what the website does. You can often find these names by brainstorming a phrase that applies to your product and then searching domain alternatives. For example; if you were going to sell model planes you might begin with www.modelplane.com and then the search engine would return that the domain is registered but would offer different combinations that are available such as the following examples taken from www.godaddy.com:

www.modelplanesite.com

www.modelplanesweb.com

www.modelplaneslive.com

Names may also be memorable because they connect indirectly to the product or service you provide. These names are branded by additional marketing and include examples such as: www.google.com, www.ebay.com, and www.amazon.com. Google means to look and can easily be associated with “looking for something”. EBay can be associated with flea markets that typically have “bay assignments” E is of course for “ecommerce” so the name is memorable. Amazon began as the “largest bookstore” therefore connecting with their name.

Names may also be completely dissociated with the product and branded later through advertisement such as: www.yahoo.com and www.godaddy.com. Both of these sites have done a great job of marketing their services and connecting the services to the name instead of the other way around. However, both of these names are memorable meaning the only challenge is to connect the name with the services. In traditional marketing consider such names as: Banana Republic, The Gap, and Sears.

You’re name should be considered carefully but as long as you can make it memorable and are absolutely committed to marketing it effectively it should be workable. Names to avoid are those that are too long or can be confused with others.

Once you have found the perfect name it is time to find a hosting program. We highly recommend both yahoo.com and godaddy.com because of their superior service and economical solutions. Let’s face it not every at bat results in a home run so use economical solutions to minimize your risk. Both of these services have excellent solutions as outlined below:

GoDaddy.com offers the following:

Domains for $8.95 a year
Domain transfers for $6.95 per year and a free 12 month extension
Hosting for free with minimal advertisement
Advertisement free hosting from 3.99 per month
Additional SEO services and free add-ons
Yahoo.com offers:

Domains from 1.99 for the first year ( some restrictions)
Management and website from 7.77 per month for small businesses
$50.00 credit for yahoo.com search advertising/services
35% off of services for new merchants
Excellent 24 hour 7 day a week customer service and discounts for add-ons and additional domains

Keywords: Shopping for a domain name

Popularity: 42% [?]

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Do you remember when search engine optimization meant nothing more then building a website with keywords and search engine submission. The world of the web has changed a great deal since then. In psychology they have a predator/prey relationship known as the ‘Red Queen Theory’. This name comes from famous idea communicated in “Through the Looking Glass”, better known as “Alice in Wonderland”. Upon arriving in the kingdom of the Red Queen, Alice discovers that people have to run as fast as they can just to stay in place. The same is true in the world of nature. The ‘Red Queen Theory’ represents the idea that for every advancement of the predator the prey also advances; thus we all run as fast as we can to keep our place. So, what does this have to do with SEO?

In the beginning we all figured out how the search engines were rating pages; the methods were pretty straight forward. Pages were basically ranked by the number of relevant keywords and popularity. Popularity could be established via search engines, advertising, or paying firms to directly visit a number of times. However, as people began to exploit the weaknesses of this system, the system evolved. In fact, no one but a precious few Google employees knows how they rate their websites in total now. However, there are some methods being promoted that have come to light that are proven to improve your web site rankings. The following is the first in a series directing you on how to use the most common methods and an explanation of the correct/incorrect ways to utilize them.

Unique and Constant Users: It is nice to get unique users but there is reason to believe that pages are also ranked by the amount of consistent traffic they receive. It is pretty easy and cheap to get a “one hit wonder” site and search engines have figured this out. You can go to an outsourcing site and for about $.25 per hit, you can pay for as many ‘unique’ web hits as you want. This is why most sites now consider not only unique users but consistent users. To gain this audience it is important to provide content that is useful and compelling. You must offer content that will draw visitors which brings us to…

Article/Web Content: Article and web content can also be obtained through outsourcing. Understand, the days of plagiarism whether from another source or yourself are over. Search engines will penalize you if they see the same content repeated on more than one page. ‘Article Spinning’ was created to provide a simple answer to this. Simply put, ‘Article Spinning’ is taking the content from one article and changing the words just enough to try and fool the search engines so they recognize it as new content. There are even software programs to take a single article and spin it into many. This is still somewhat effective, however, search engines have begun more extensive searches to look for this method and as the software is introduced to the public, it is also incorporated by the search engines. If you want to effectively promote your site…it is important that you have authentically valuable content. The web has grown to large to compete with anything less. You can still use outsourcing, but put thought into what content you want to offer and specify your articles as much as possible.

Keywords: SEO 101

Popularity: 40% [?]

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