Blogging and Marketing Resources for the Average Blogger and Business
Posts tagged Keyword
Choosing a Domain Name – Part 2
May 21st
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The Rest of Your Domain Selection
In Part 1 of Choosing a Domain Name, I focused on the high level “dot com” as the most common flavor when selecting a domain name. This time, the focus will be on the identity itself – the main part of your Uniform Resource Locator (URL).
Here’s a quote from “How to Podcast Tutorial” that talks about one aspect of domain name selection:
“This is the web address for my podcast tutorial site which launched my brand as a podcasting expert and landed me a book deal. I intentionally incorporated two of the top keyword search phrases for my topic (i.e. “how to podcast” and “podcast tutorial”).
I should point out that the hyphens are there because of some evidence showing that it emphasizes the keywords to the search engine bots. However, as of late it seems that this is not always necessary. I’m tending away from the practice of using hyphenated URLs.”
Just like my last post, clear as mud. In my opinion, why not? If there’s a chance the bots will show some love with the keywords separated by hyphens, why not? If a smooth URL (without hyphens) is needed for marketing purposes, simply redirect it to the dashed version. Best of both worlds.
[Blogger's note: You eagle-eyed readers no doubt have noticed I'm not walking my talk. The Ultimate Blogging Toolkit doesn't use hyphens. Fair point. This revelation was not visible to me as a complete rookie when I started. I'll have to save it for my next project, which is firmly up my sleeve. Live and learn.]
ProBlogger has a lengthy post about choosing your domain name, but there’s one paragraph that rings true to why I decided to create and host my own domain: credibility. They say,
“Having your own domain name is desirable for many bloggers for numerous reasons. For a start if you’re wanting to build credibility and a sense of professionalism around your blog a domain that reflects this can help. Similarly a carefully selected domain name has the ability to enhance the branding of a product, service, business or even person. Domain purchases give the added bonus of email addresses with the same domain (adding to both professionalism and branding) and can enhance your Search Engine Ranking.”
Although I have not yet begun to use my domain’s email addresses due to ease of startup, I knew from the beginning this was to be a serious and professional effort. (My “fun” postings are conducted on my other blog, TheNewBloggedWord.Blogspot.com.)
There are many free, shared domain blogs on the Bloggers of the world that are quite serious in their intentions. Nothing disparaging intended. My only point is that we only have one chance for a first impression. My argument is that the first impression can be the URL – make it professional and effective.
Dave
Permalink Selection Improves SEO
Mar 22nd
Permalink Selection Improves SEO
There are many factors involved with getting more traffic to your blog. All the regular ones apply, of course like post often, use relevant terms in your post title, narrow your genre to a specific topic, and so on. In our fast-paced world, these alone can present considerable challenges, just taking the time to do them right. Each one of these requires us to make the right decisions for maximizing our effectiveness.
In this post, I’d like to provide a perspective on a decision you can make once – then enjoy the benefits every day. That decision is how you configure your blog’s Permalinks.
According to Wikipedia, a Permalink, or “Permanent Link” is “a URL that points to a specific blog or forum entry after it has passed from the front page to the archives.” This is important since links can become less stable over time as web sites evolve, merge and go away. Permalinks are mostly associated with blogs as a way to identify individual posts.
Since the Ultimate Blogging Toolkit uses WordPress as the blogging platform of choice, references to Permalink specifics will of course relate to WordPress. In WordPress, there are several ways you can format your Permalink, or the actual URL of your individual posts. They give you the following format options (Settings > Permalinks):
- Default http://www.ultimatebloggingtoolkit.com/?p=123
- Day and Name http://www.ultimatebloggingtoolkit.com/2009/03/22/sample-post/
- Month and Name http://www.ultimatebloggingtoolkit.com/2009/03/sample-post/
- Numeric http://www.ultimatebloggingtoolkit.com/archives/123
- Custom
Optionally, WordPress allows you to select Categories or Tags to preface the unique part of the Permalink.
You can see that based on your decision, your individual posts will take on considerably different formats. At last, the point of this post! Notice the differences between the default and the formats that include names. With the default, a sequential number is assigned, very efficiently, but not so SEO friendly. However, the formats with names also show the post date. That could be a bit more than us beginning bloggers want to show, just in case the day job gets in the way and we can’t post for a while. I’ve settled on an efficient, but SEO friendly format that doesn’t open the date kimono too far. Let’s look at a couple of other perspectives before I feel a draft.
First, a look at this from an efficiency perspective. In Geek Ramblings by Dougal Campbell, the point is made to not use text like Categories or Tags since there is a significant performance hit due to WordPress trying to distinguish between posts and pages. Significantly more information is stored to accommodate. The recommendation is to start the Permalink format with a number, like Date or the Post ID.
At The SEO Blogger, they are making a sound point about the importance of getting the post’s name in the Permalink structure. As I indicated earlier, carefully naming your blog post allows those keywords to be visible. Again, any time you can generate more SEO juice, the better. However, their suggestion about using Category as the initial identifier conflicts with Geek Ramblings.
Here’s my solution:
WordPress offers a Custom Structure, allowing you to design your own. I chose:
/%post_id%/%postname%/
In this format, the unique identification number assigned by WordPress starts the string, providing for increased efficiency of storing the posts. Then, the Post Name allows for the maximum SEO juice to be squeezed. In my opinion, the best combination.
While I still need to make good decisions each time I title a blog posting, this is one decision that is now made and will provide benefits far into the future.
Dave
Choosing a Domain Name
Feb 18th
Whew! This is one that could be a topic for an entire blog. Not to worry, I’ll start with a single post.
Choosing a domain name is as much art is as it is science. Considerations range from the emotional connection to a branding message that comes from a carefully concieved name to the search engine love that is generated by bots finding strong keywords in the URL. Your strategy is clear as mud.
The dot com in this post’s photo implies the value of the top level domain staple. However, there are differing views as to its true value. A staunch supporter is SEOmoz. To quote a part of their post, “With the exception of the very tech-savvy, most people who use the web still make the automatic assumption that .com is all that’s out there…” I agree with this sentiment – I can’t tell you how many times I have finished typing a URL with .com only to find out it was something else. Old habits die hard.
At the other end of the spectrum is BloggingTips.com. They run at it from a different direction. A quote from their site: ”If you have relevant content on your site that incorporates well-researched, popular keyword phrases as it relates to your niche, your blog/website will get good search engine ranking – no matter what its named, or what dot it ends in.” Again, I agree with this position.
Choosing which “dot this or dot that” you should use for your site’s top level domain is only a small part of the decisions involved with naming your site. In future posts, we’ll explore many of the other considerations for naming your baby. After all, we want it to grow up and be healthy and strong.
Dave
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