SEO Training

Domaining, or the practice of buying other domains for SEO purposes used to be popular.  That was because it worked.  Now though, particularly since it is difficult to get relevant domains as .com, but also because of changes in search engine algorithms domaining is not as effective as it once was.

Brian Cowen Supports Domaining for SEO.... but it's still a good idea. (he may not actually know what I'm talking about)

Does this mean we should all give up on domaining?  Not at all.

Here are 5 reasons why domaining is worth doing.

1. Domain Typos

As an example let’s say I had a site called wortley.com.  Wortley happens to be my surname.  The trouble with it is that hardly anybody on the planet can spell it properly!  In Ireland the most common mis-spelling is Worthley.  So if somebody was to try and find my site, then typing in www.worthley.com would return them precisely nothing.

So if your company name is prone to typo’s then buying similarly named domains that people may type to get to your site makes sense.  You just redirect them to the correct site.

2. Your Company Name Is Often Shortened to Initials or has the word “and” in it, or other confusing letters.

If my company name happened to be Wortley and O’Connor Ltd for some inexplicable reason, then it is not going to be readily obvious what my website is going to be.  Is it woc.com, wortleyoconner.com, wortleyandoconner.com or even wortleyoc.com?

For this reason I will never name a company in this way.  Particularly since nobody can spell Wortley in the first place and the apostrophe in O’Conner sends people into a state of utter confusion.

If I was stuck with that as a company name I would be well advised to get all versions of it though.

3. .com or .ie

If my site was wortley.ie then (assuming people have learned how to spell it) how many people would type in wortley.com first?  A lot.  People assume .com endings.  You may notice that this site does not have the .com version.  You may also be amused to note what happens if you type in http://www.seotraining.com

If you do you will notice that you are redirected to a .org domain.  (probably won’t notice that first though).

If it is possible, then getting the .com, .net, .org and .ie versions of your site makes sense.  One other good reason to do this is that nobody else can come along and set up a near duplicate site to yours.  Imagine if your business is an online shop with a .ie domain name and somebody comes along and sets up the same domain name with a .com ending.  They could make the site similar looking to yours and sell similar products.  You would lose business.

4. Keyword rich domains

If you are in Ireland and do a search for SEO training then you will find that this site comes up at the top of google.  Why is that?  Well the domain name is seotraining.ie, the subject matter is SEO training and generally you will find references to search engine optimisation creeping into nearly every post.

I am using this domain to target those keywords.  My main site http://www.webshed.ie has no reference to seo in the domain name and it would be a lot harder to make it rank for that.

I have heard a lot of “professional SEO consultants” say that it doesn’t work anymore.  Well it does for this site (and a few others I have).  Also I have not put any effort at all into link building to this site.  It is all about the content.

5. Company Rebranding

My last post was about rebranding your website.  If your company is taken over, does a merger or simply wants to rebrand what happens to your website?  You will still have visitors going to the old domains.  You need to redirect that traffic to your new domain.

Online Marketing Forum

I have just created a brand new Online Marketing forum on my home site.  It will cover SEO at all levels, online and offline marketing and PR.  That’s just as a starting point.

I observed that while there is a huge interest in the business community regarding SEO and Online Marketing in general, there is a natural reluctance to ask questions to real life people.  I understand this completely.  Nobody likes to appear ill informed.  Social Media and SEO are relatively new fields though.  They are also fields where there is a lot of bad information available online.  Online Branding is a new concept to many businesses, particularly for SME’s.

SEO training and Social Media training are my own preferred areas, but while I can personally add a lot to the forum in these areas, I want people to freely express their own views in all areas.  The forum is to be a free information resource.

My purpose in creating the Online Marketing Forum, was to create an environment where people could ask the “silly questions” with a degree of anonymity.  It should also become a place where professionals can argue the pros and cons of their latest thinking.

The forum is brand new, so therefor it is fairly empty at the moment.  Don’t hold back.  If you are involved in Online Marketing or want to find out more about it then join it.  Post a question, comment or hypothesis.  This is a resource for you.  This is a free resource and while it is hosted on the Webshed site, I hope that it will be populated by professionals in competing companies as well as my own.

I've heard of a fire engine, but what is a search engine?

The difference between SEO and SEM is that SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation while SEM stands for Search Engine Marketing.

Strictly speaking SEO means targeting just search engines.  It is concerned with getting your site as far up the Google, yahoo and Bing rankings for chosen keywords as possible.  Achieving that is done in many ways.

SEM on the other hand has several meanings in regular use.  Some think of it purely as PPC (pay per click) advertising campaigns.  These are the ads you see on the right of the search results in search engines, and occasionally occupying the top slots.  I like to think of it as much more than that though.

When I think of SEM the word marketing takes priority.  I like to think of Search Engine Marketing as encompassing SEO but taking into account the user experience.

Let me expand on that.  A site may be extremely well optimised from an SEO perspective, ranking well in the major search engines, but that does not mean that the site is a good user experience.

It is a mistake to put SEO ahead of user experience.  I’ll give you an example. The following is SEO optimised text

Car washing by the car washing experts.  At Car Washing Ireland we wash cars all day every day.  When it comes to car washing we are the number one car washing company in Ireland.  If your car needs car washing then you have found the right site.  Contact us and one of our mobile car washing units will be dispatched to you and one of our car washing experts will have your car gleaming.  You will be so impressed with our car washing that you will return to car washing ireland again and again.

Actually, that is terrible SEO.  I have exaggerated it hugely.  The point is that SEO optimised text is not necessarily particularly readable text.  If the quality of English is high, then you use different words or phrases to describe the same thing.  This is at odds with SEO, where you want to repeat your key phrases.

The object is to achieve good legible text that a user will read, while retaining a keyword density that is reasonably high (though not much above 5% of total text).  It would be entirely better for both SEO and the user experience to write the above text with far fewer instances of “Car Washing”.

SEM (Search Engine Marketing) is all about S......elling!

SEM is more holistic.  It encompasses good SEO techniques for on page content (but not at the expense of the user experience).  It also covers Social Media as well as PPC advertising and even banner or button advertising.  Search Engine Marketing is about selling your site online.

A lot of SEO’s make the mistake of using the meta description purely to put in keywords.  Same goes for the page title.

In the case of the meta description it is fairly likely that google does not include that text in any meaningful way in its ranking algorithms.  I am not saying that you should not put keywords into the meta description or page title, but use them to better effect.

Better effect means using them to sell.  To stick with our car washing example, The title can be “Car washing Ireland”, the meta description could read “Get your car washed at home or at work.  We come to you.  Discount for online booking”.  No key words.  Just good descriptive text that helps sell the service.

The whole reason for this post was because I am writing about Social Media and somebody asked me “what has social media got to do with SEO training?”.

Well these days you can’t market your website online without at least paying lip service to social media.  And if you know your stuff (or get Social Media Training) then you can really make it work for you in a big way.  Look at what happened with the Susan Boyle clip on You Tube.  She became an overnight, international sensation, from a clip of an audition!  Wow.  That just does not happen with traditional media.

Why do companies invest thousands of euros in SEO training?  It’s all part of their marketing mix.  SEO is marketing.  Therefore, SEO is SEM and SEM includes SEO.  By the way.  I’ve just broken a rule there.  I’ve overused the phrases again (my site may pay for all this bad SEO!).  I was only playing with words, but be careful.  Remember we are dealing with dumb machines (no matter how good the algorithms are).  They do not see a bit of word play, but rather an attempt at keyword stuffing, which can hurt your ranking.

So, SEM is all about selling.  SEO is just about trying to get better ranking on Google et al.

One of these days I’ll learn to write short concise posts, but I hope that I’ve cleared up the difference between SEO and SEM somewhat.