Expired Domains: What To Look For, SEO-wise

Posted on February 15, 2012 by SEO Expert

Sometimes, buying an expired domain is preferred because it carries some attributes that cannot be earned up front when registering a web address for the first time. SEO experts look after these characteristics to see if a domain is good enough to buy for future re-selling or personal usage.

When a domain name you’re after has been previously registered, you’ll need to do a background check before buying it. Most expired domains are auctioned off, so knowing these things will help you determine which ones are worth your money. At the same time, you can also find out if a domain is hiding any skeletons in its closet.

Domain age

No matter what others may say, it is obvious that search engines consider domain age as one of their ranking factors. Simply put, domain age is one way of measuring authority and trustworthiness (spam sites generally don’t last long).

Take this example, a query for the keyword “corporate giveaways”. The top spot belongs to a website which has been around since 1999 – the oldest among the others on page 1. On the second spot is a website from circa 2006, while the third spot is a 10-year old website.

Looking at these results, it is obvious that domain age does have some control over search engine rankings. From what we can see, it looks like the second website was given priority because the keyword is in the domain name itself. Overall, the trend shows that older websites have a place in the first page of SERPs.

Previous penalties

A website involved in spam activity or other indecency is not tolerated by search engines. These websites are penalized. Suffice to say that a penalized website will not be able to perform SEO-wise for many months.

Right now, there is no standard way to check whether a website has been penalized. You’ll have to rely on the transparency of the previous owner. In any case, if you think you bought a penalized website, you can simply send a reconsideration request or re-inclusion request to the search engine. Google provides an online form for this purpose (log-in required).

Established backlinks

A previously active website must have a portfolio of past promotions done by its webmaster. Established backlinks remain active even after a complete management turnover. Those wanting to buy an expired domain for SEO purposes look for a website with a good number of established backlinks to benefit from its leftover link juice.

Some type of backlink analysis should be done just to see what kind of promotion has been done in the past on a domain. Was it linking to quality websites, or is it involved in sketchy link exchange programs? You also want to look for relevant backlinks, so it can still benefit the new website.

Others

There is no telling how much people are willing to pay for an expired domain. It really depends on how much they are bent on having it. Sometimes you may have to weigh branding with cost because some domains sell for over $200.

Buying expired domains can be a lot of work than you initially thought, but the job can be easier if you know what you are looking for (and how much your budget is).

How To Choose A Domain Name For SEO

Posted on February 9, 2012 by SEO Expert

Choosing a permanent web address is just like buying a new home in the cyber world. It requires some consideration, especially if you have SEO in mind. Besides branding and long-term commitment (a domain name must be registered for at least 1 year), a domain name can also make or break a website’s search engine ranking.

What’s in a name?

A good URL should be simple and straightforward so users can easily remember it. Take Yahoo! and Google, as examples. The company name is the first priority, but a word or words that can easily be identified with the business is also commonly used.

Try to think what words your users would most likely enter into the search engines when looking for your website. Such words are referred to in the SEO world as “keywords”. Having your target keyword on the URL makes it easier for search engines to identify your website as an expert on the field. These keywords would also most likely end up in the anchor text that other people will create, when linking to your site. So, why else did we name this site “seo website“?

Quality check

Just because your keyword is “death defying stunts of the 21st century”, it doesn’t mean that you have to dot-com the whole phrase. Long phrases are generally harder to memorize, and search engines also do not know how to separate each word in a URL.

Case in point, domainsextension.com can be interpreted as “domains extension”, or “do main sex tension”. So, try to stay away from domains like these because search engines tend to block websites that have the slightest hint of indecency.

If you won’t change your mind about the choice of words, better use hyphens (domains-extension.com) because these are seen as blank spaces by search engines. Copyrighted words must also be avoided because these may result to copyright issues later on.

Picking a TLD

Any SEO expert will tell you that a .com is the best top-level domain (TLD) to get. This is because .com is widely used and easy to remember. It is also the most appropriate for commercial business entities.

You may encounter others who would say that search engines put more importance to .com sites over others, like the .info. Although there is no real proof to this, it is a fact that .info domains are cheaper, and so these are more likely to be used by spam creators. We know that search engines do not like spam, so it could possibly be one of the reasons why .info seems to rank low in SERPs.

The domain name is only one of the many factors that search engines consider when ranking search results. Beneath its face value, there are still a few more things to learn about domain names and SEO. In the meantime, start creating quality content. After all, content still holds the top spot in ranking a website.

Top 5 Places To Get Social Traffic

Posted on January 31, 2012 by SEO Expert

After search engine traffic, web 2.0 is the next best place to receive traffic. Web 2.0 is comprised of websites that allow its visitors to do more things than just read a page from top to bottom.

These emerging websites let users manage content by creating, sharing and interacting with other users. Otherwise known as the social web, visitors coming from these avenues are referred to as social traffic.

Social traffic is important for SEO because it brings targeted users. Links are passed on through cyber word-of-mouth. The backlinks formed through these media are accessed by users having related interests – which make them good quality backlinks.

Here’s a rundown of my top 5 ways to get social traffic:

1. Social bookmarking

Those small collection of tiny buttons you usually see at the end of an article are quick links to social media sites – an easy one-click promotion for your website. Social bookmarking sites provide instant backlinks to each of your pages.

These sites not only allow users to keep their bookmarked pages on-the-go, but these also foster sharing of bookmarks through tag labels. There are so many bookmarking sites out there, but right now, the ones worth bookmarking to are Delicious, StumbleUpon, Diigo (formerly Furl) and Pinterest because of their popularity (= wide user base).

2. Social news

Similar to social bookmarking sites, social news sites focuses more on article promotion. Digg, Newsvine and Reddit are some examples of social news sites out there. Users can share a links to interesting articles and promote them through the a voting system, which at the same time, can also sink unpopular articles.

Similar sites like Technorati, Squidoo and Buzzfeed allow users to create their own content right on their website.

3. Social networking

We have seen the influential power of social networking. It’s no longer a popularity game, where you want to have as much friends as a rock star (hint: MySpace). Social networking now functions as a real venue for people to socialize. Facebook, in particular, has already become a part of most people’s daily lives.

It is easy to share information through social networks, so website promotion is less tedious. An example of this is FB’s “like” button or Google’s “+1″ button. When a user clicks on it, all his friends get notified and so they gain access to the new information. This button can be embedded on to any webpage, so the users are essentially doing the promotion for you. Additonally, in FB, webmasters can create a fan page for their site which can be linked to the main website as well.

4. Microblogging

What seems to be only an offshoot of blogs and social networking sites, microblogging is also another way to reach out to your target audience. It doesn’t require as much work as full-on blogging, or maintaining a profile page. Just embed your link from time to time when posting a blurb through sites like Twitter, Plurk or Foursquare. When posting a photo, through Tumblr for example, you can just as well watermark it with your URL.

5. YouTube

A household name in its own right, YouTube is the place for user-generated videos. Thousands of how-to tutorials, funny videos and presentations are uploaded on this website. It is not a search engine but users frequent YouTube to search for content.

There a few ways to channel traffic from YouTube to your website. First is by creating a how-to video that’s so helpful to users, they’d want to share it. Second is by creating a viral video, usually a funny video and embed your website on the notes or on the credits. The problem with this is that it may not be related to your content at all. Third is by posting a video response to an already viral video, which is basically riding the popularity wave.

Social media can be a powerful tool to make your website viral. In SEO, viral is good.

What Exactly Is The Deal With PageRank (And How To Improve It)?

Posted on January 27, 2012 by SEO Expert

Many of the SEO concepts we encounter are under debate. One such topic is the importance of Google PageRank.

Overview

Every search result that Google churns out is a result of over 200 factors that govern their algorithm. One of these factors is the so-called “PageRank“.

As Google puts it:

“PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank.”

Of course, big G knows more than just to credit each and every link that points to a website. Spam links are isolated, together with other links that are manipulated and doesn’t seem to be relevant (an effect of abusing link exchanges and link farms). This is why SEO specialists are always on their toes to build quality links.

PageRank (PR) is presented as a numerical grade system, 0 being the lowest score and 10 as the highest. A fresh new website will have a PR score of 0, while a large authority website will most likely have a score of 8 to 10.

PageRank and SEO

There was a time when PageRank was believed to be the driving force in SEO. It was thought that Google derives its search results according to PR score (PR 10 on top of the list, and so on). But if we do some tests, we will find that the first page of Google results may not necessarily display websites in descending PR order.

Here, a search for “Womens Hiking Shorts” pulls up websites of varied PR scores:

This is why some SEO experts do not even bother to check their website’s PR; as long as they take care of the other tasks that help improve ranking such as article marketing, link building, on-page SEO and others.

Is it still important?

These days, we know that it takes more than just a PR score to lay the groundwork for good ranking. However, we know that it still carries some weight in website optimization. Domains are sold according to their preexisting PR value and high PR backlinks are sought after because those may guarantee a priority spot in search engine results pages (SERPs).

Website optimizers often target at least a PR 4, which is more often than not, a ticket to the first page of Google results. This ranking factor works on page-level statistics, so a domain.com PR score may be different from a domain.com/page PR. At the same time, the PR value of a webpage may be different at any given time, but Google does not let webmasters take a peek at its actual value. In fact, the PageRank values displayed on Google toolbar or SEO Quake (in the illustration above), for example, lags at least a month behind.

Improving PageRank

SEO experts may have different takes on how to increase PageRank, but here are some things that are consistent across the board:

build relevant, and quality external backlinks
build internal backlinks (links between pages in your site)
Use an SEO-friendly template
limit links within a page (too much links might look bad)
submit only to link directories with high PR
continue creating quality content (so readers will want to share your page)

With all that being said, PageRank may just be a way for Google to classify a website but may not really have a direct effect on ranking. In any case, websites built with good intentions will sooner or later place on top of the SERPs.

SEO Writing: Keyword Density FAQ

Posted on January 18, 2012 by SEO Expert

Keyword density was all the hype many years ago, when search engines worked on much simpler algorithms. Just sprinkle your content with enough keywords and phrases and you will see your website rocket to the top of the results page.

Nowadays, SEO work is more complex and to check keyword density is on the bottom of the to-do list. It’s mostly because the practice has been abused to the extent that search engines penalize pages with overly redundant keywords.

What is keyword density?

For those who are new to this, keyword density is the ratio of keywords or phrases to the total number of words in an article. Back then, topic relevancy was gauged on the number of times a keyword appears in an article.

What is the best keyword density ratio?

Now, the tricky question. Many SEO experts keep a keyword density of around 2 percent (calculation details explained in Wiki). This is not bad, nor is it a cut and dry figure.

The relevancy of a page to a search term has evolved to include more defining factors, not just a single set of words. Search engines know better than to pick webpages showing the same key words or phrases again and again (which sounds too fabricated).

How to use keywords wisely?

Somebody masterfully writing about a subject would write variations of a key phrase and even include related terms in a single article. This means that an article merely mentioning laptop coolers in a blog is different than an article review for the same thing because the text would most likely have other related words like “USB”, “fan”, “temperature” and even a mention of brand names.

Is keyword density outdated?

If there’s one thing you can do to optimize your target keywords in an article, it is to include them in the header tags – h1 and h2 (title and sections) and so on. Words put into header tags convey importance, and this is exactly how search engines see it.

Similarly, emphasized (html tag <em>) and strong (html tag <strong>) words provide the needed highlight for crawlers to easily spot them.

To say not to check keyword density anymore may be too extreme. There is still some importance in checking keyword density. First, to know whether your article is keyword stuffed (which is not good); and next is to check whether the text is highlighting the wrong terms – a result of consciously avoiding the keyword you’re supposedly running after.

Whether you actively check keyword density or not, as long as you write naturally and the article flow is good, they keyword density will most likely fall within the 2% range.

Domain Canonicalization: To www, Or Not To www?

Posted on January 6, 2012 by SEO Expert

Here’s something you may want to look into, in getting your site ranked better: domain canonicalization.

Any single webpage may be accessed through a number of URLs, but mainly it’s between www.domain.com vs. domain.com (without the “www”). In the eyes of Google, these URLs are different entities, so they get indexed separately – not good for SEO. Why? Because it will split up the rankings.

To canonize a domain is basically to assign the best URL version for search engines to crawl and index. Close to the original use of the term, it’s like giving it a saintly status.

To check how your site is indexed by big G, do a site: search. Compare the results between site:www.domain.com and site:domain.com. Whichever version turns up most on the results page is your better bet when it comes to creating backlinks.

Take a look at this example where only one version of the domain is indexed:

site:www.domain.com search turns up with no results

site:domain.com search shows pages have been indexed

Consistency is key. If the non-www domain.com version is indexed, then there is no use building backlinks using www.domain.com because it may not do your rankings any good.

But for this website, seowebsite.com, the www-version shows up on both search parameters:

The domain.com search comes up with all www.domain.com results

On this search using www.domain.com, it shows all 14 pages are indexed

To manually set your preference, set up an account at Google Webmaster Tools and go to: Site configuration > Settings > Preferred Domains. Check their help page here. You may additionally do a 301-redirect to your preferred canonical domain, which is pretty much telling the other search engines your preference, too.

There’s also an option to redirect straight from your web host. In which case, it essentially diverts traffic to just one domain, instead of scattering them to the different URL versions.

So, today I learned that one of my new blogs, juantobuy.com is not indexed as www.juantobuy.com. In effect, I will put all backlinking efforts toward the former URL, to maintain consistency (I just did it right there). For this website, however, www.seowebsite.com is more dominant, so that’s what needs to be used from this point on.

Domain canonicalization sounds like a complicated business, but it really isn’t.

How To Apply SEO On Images

Posted on January 4, 2012 by SEO Expert

One thing that’s often overlooked when doing SEO is image optimization. We always talk about content when doing SEO because a huge bulk of any website consists of it. Every internet marketer needs to focus on producing high quality content for his website because it is the basis for search engine ranking.

Once the text is complete, take some time to edit the properties of the photos that will come with it. You’ll want to rank for both text and image results because some websites are more accessible through image search than web search.

PeoplPhoto blogs, celebrities, fashion, travel destinations, gadgets and other websites that feature tangible goods . How else will you search for those new pair of sneakers you saw on the store window on your way to work?

With that in mind, here’s what you can do to optimize images in an article:

Keyword use

SEO photo: optimize your images (see what I did here?)

Rename the image file to include your target keyword.
Use the alt text and incorporate your keyword in it, too (if the image doesn’t show up for some reason, the alternative text will be displayed – this is also what search engines ‘see’).
Add a photo caption with your keywords on it.
If the image loads on its own page, optimize the page title.
Use the word “photo” after your alt, file name and caption text.

Image quality

Upload only your desired image size; anything smaller won’t look good while anything bigger requires more time to load.
If using a thumbnail, make sure it is really a smaller copy of the photo, not just a re-sized version.
Choose clear, high quality photos to attract more interest even from the search page.
If using an original image, add a watermark showing your URL for visibility, particularly if somebody else decides to borrow the image.

Crawl-ability

Place all images in a single folder where search engines can easily crawl them.
Use a reliable photo hosting site like Picasa and Flickr if you can’t host them yourself.
Try to limit the number of images in one page.

There are also tools out there that can make images SEO-friendlier. Content is still king, but going the extra mile by optimizing images can potentially bring even more to a website.

Is Blog Commenting Still Beneficial For Your SEO?

Posted on January 3, 2012 by SEO Expert

Blog commenting used to be one of the easiest ways to get relevant backlinks for SEO purposes. But as more and more people abused this technique, mostly by automating spam comments, search engines have made it less significant in their algorithm.

Although that is the case, many websites still receive a good amount of spam comments. In this recently created blog, for example, blog comments turn up almost on a daily basis. So, why are people still people doing it?

For those who are just starting out with a small weblog, commenting on other blogs is an easy way to make yourself known in the blogosphere. This is good for SEO because other bloggers will want to link up with you, or even mention you in their articles.

In the same manner, you will easily establish a network that can help sustain your website’s organic growth (which search engines like). Having an extensive network of friends and co-bloggers on top of your Facebook and Twitter followers can be helpful in bringing in traffic, and dissemination of your content.

Adding a link within a blog comment has lost its backlinking power primarily because a lot of blog platforms have pre-set the comment links to “no-follow”, which means any link posted on a page will not have any bearing when search engines crawl it.

The easiest way to find out if a blog is “no-follow” or “do-follow” is by installing an SEO add-on or plugin on your browser. These things work like magic, revealing no-follow links in just a few clicks. For the the three big browsers:

Google Chrome: Chrome SEO
Internet Explorer: SEO Quake
Mozilla Firefox: NoDoFollow or SEO Quake

If you’re heavily bent on creating SEO-worthy backlinks when blog commenting, here are some things you need to remember:

Keep busy commenting on “do-follow” blogs only – otherwise, your links (and effort) will be useless.
Don’t just comment spam, read the blog and provide real comments and insights about the post – you’ll want your comment to get approved.
Provide something more for the readers when pointing back to your website – give them more information (something that was not mentioned in the article), to compel the readers to visit your website.
Do your blog commenting sporadically throughout the week – to make it look natural, not automated or spammy.
Use different versions of your anchor text – Don’t push your keywords too much on every blog comment because it will look unnatural.

Blog commenting nowadays tends to provide more visibility benefit than backlinks. Still, it can provide good quality backlinks, if you do it with good intentions. The power of blog commenting may have dwindled down, but just like any other SEO technique, it’s up to you to use it to the best of your website’s advantage.

How Does 3-Way Link Building Work?

Posted on December 12, 2011 by SEO Expert

Link building as a strategy

We know that link building plays an important role in site ranking. Search engines give more importance to sites that are well-mentioned, because it is a sign of authority.

A one way link is the best kind of link you can get, especially if it’s coming from another authority site, which includes your competition. Search engines give priority to one way links because these are hard to manipulate, hence, more legitimate.

It’s not that easy to ask other webmasters to link to your site without offering something in return. That’s why 2-way links through link exchanges have become popular when doing SEO in the past years. Recently however, 2-way links have begun to look bad in the eyes of search engines.

The link pyramid

2-way links, or reciprocal links, are very easy to come by because of its barter nature. But over the years, the complexity of Google’s PageRank and other factors have made reciprocal links less significant in search ranking. Because of this, 3-way links (link pyramids) are looking like a better option.

An owner of two websites, Website A and Website B, for example, can offer a link exchange with the owner of Website C. The way it is usually set up, Website A is the main website while Website B is a secondary site. The owner will offer a link to Website C from Website B. In return, Website C will link to Website A.

Pros and Cons of 3-way link exchange

This 3-way link exchange will make the links look like one-way links, which is generally good for ranking. Many SEO practitioners are aware of this strategy, there are even tools made to create these links automatically – on a larger scale.

Taking part in a 3-way link exchange sounds like shady business. Using tools to jack up one’s backlinks might be detected by search engines sooner or later, so take caution when getting involved in this trade. Do your research and make sure you will benefit from it before jumping in.

What Is A Backlink (And How To Get More Of It)?

Posted on December 5, 2011 by SEO Expert

The importance of backlinks is mentioned many times in SEO. Any external link that points to a website is called a backlink.

An external link is a link coming from another website, not your own. These links act like a popularity vote, which help rank a website in search engine results. On the other hand, links that point to a webpage within the same domain is called an internal link. Internal links can also help in SEO.

If you are new to links, there’s a quick tutorial here (now that’s an internal link).

Backlinks can come in the form of text within a paragraph, like if somebody mentions you in a blog post, or text on a sidebar such as in blogrolls. It can also be embedded in images. When a photo from another website is used, it is common courtesy to link back to the owner’s page.

Quality content and good photos can help you get backlinks without any effort – as other people will voluntarily post your noteworthy content to their websites. There are also ways to put up links to your website out there. Here are some ways to get more backlinks:

Blog commenting – Commenting on other blogs is a way to interact with people in the blogosphere. By leaving a small link to your blog, you will also create backlinks.
Forum posting – Take part in forums or discussion boards to attract readers with similar interests. Activate the user signature option to automatically leave a backlink at the end of each post.
Article marketing – Submit articles (with links embedded) to different article directories regularly. Using article submission tools can help speed up the task.
Link exchanges – Exchanging links is a common practice among bloggers. This is encouraged as long as the website you’re linking with serves similar content, or else the backlink will be irrelevant.
Website banners – By offering banner images to your website, readers and other bloggers can easily link to your page by grabbing the banner code. Banner exchanges are also entertained in the same way as link exchanges.
Guest blogging – Writing articles for other blogs is also helpful in creating backlinks, especially if you are writing for a more influential blog. This also helps your blog become more popular, and receive more traffic.

In SEO, we want to place on the first page, if not on top of the search results. We may never know how search engines work, but we know that the number of backlinks is essential for search engines to measure the authority of a website.

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