- Exact keyword match domain names were once a prime online commodity, for example if you had a website about “Umbrellas” then the domain name Umbrellas.com would automatically do very well in the search engines with very little SEO.  Luckily the days of exact match domain dominance has dwindled in Google and things are a lot more open to people who weren’t lucky (or rich) enough to get the perfect domain name.

If you can get the perfect matching domain name then that’s great, if not then don’t worry too much just make sure your main, broad keyword is mentioned within the domain name for example WonderfulUmbrellas.com would be fine in the example above.

- The domain extension is important for a few reasons. You can buy domain names with many extensions including ‘.com’, ‘.co.uk’, ‘.biz’ and ‘.co’. Usually the lesser known domain extensions are available (like ‘.biz’ for example) because they are deemed a lot less valuable than common extensions such as ‘.com’ and ‘.co.uk’.

It’s true that websites that use say the ‘.biz’ extension are on average more spammy/untrustworthy than sites on the ‘.com’ extension; educational or government extensions are generally very legitimate.  Google’s Matt Cutts has quoted that the domain extension doesn’t effect Google’s rankings of a website which has had many strongly opposing views from SEO’s around the globe.

Whether or not it’s bad to use a ‘.net’, ‘.biz’ or ‘.co’ domain name extension, these have three more distinct disadvantages:
1) People find it hard to remember anything but a ‘.com’ or a local extension such as ‘.co.uk’ when you mention a website’s name in person or on a real-world advert
2) Webmasters trust domain extensions such as ‘.biz’ with less regard due to the number of spammers using them, finding external links and gaining trust is therefore a lot harder
3) Most businesses serve local areas, if your target market is the UK then a ‘.co.uk’ will help a little with SEO and gain local visitor trust

- Brands are becoming more important in SEO and it’s a great idea to create one before choosing a domain name.  Brands usually have a physical location, gain natural links and people search for them on search engines, this means that brands are a good trust signal to Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. so they gain a little more advantage in SEO.

Brand names can get associated with products/services, or more importantly keywords; when you think of the brand Ferrari most people will instantly think of ‘cars’ or perhaps even ‘sports cars’ for example.  Google also associates keywords with other keywords, a function that boosts it’s spell checking facility, paid advertisements and little things such as the Wonder Wheel.  If your brand name was associated with a certain product or service then you have a double boost with both keywords in your domain name if you chose a name in this format: [Brand Name][Main Keyword].com

So when choosing a domain name think about creating a brand and adding in your main keyword for SEO. Avoid domain extensions (also known as TLD’s) such as ‘.biz’ and if you are a local business then perhaps go for your local domain extension and also buy the ‘.com’ for future security.

One last thing to mention is dashes; always consider how easy it is for another person to remember your domain name after you tell them the name in person. Each dash in a domain name represents another barrier in getting people to a website, more than one dash makes it near impossible!  Avoid domain names such as best-umbrella-company.com, if possible avoid dashes completely, there is a strong consensus that two or more dashes will harm your SEO in general.  Good luck!

Unfortunately there are a few ways forums can go off-track; this can harm traffic levels, on-site SEO and up-sell profits made from members and visitors.

Spammers are the main cause of angst and disruption on Forums.  They waste costly bandwidth, they put off loyal members, they waste time to deal with, they can harm your on-site SEO and worst of all they could be ruining your forum until you have to admit defeat and close it down.

There’s two types of spam you can come across on forums:

Self Promotion

The main ranking factor from Google is the number and quality of links from other websites going to your own.

If you sold bicycles then you could easily go on to a forum and create a backlink to your own site and booster it’s SEO power.  This link would be even better if it had the anchor text of the main keyword the site was aimed at, for example “buy bicycles” so a lot of forum spammers are adding their links into the signature part of their profiles where you can chose any anchor text.

Multiple links can be gained by posting multiple comments with a link in the signature, some people with 1,000′s of posts in a forum have even been selling these links as you’ll suddenly get 1000′s of links pointing towards any site!  Profiles from social networks and forums too are a place where you can build a link for free and again each post links towards them.

Some businesses with big product brands have been caught self promoting on other similar product pages within forums.  A forum thread talking about a certain bicycle for example may have a rival bicycle company comment saying something like “I prefer the XYZ bike as it’s way cooler! You can buy it for only £99.99 from XYZBikeStore.co.uk”

Useless Chatter

Every Forum has an annoying person who will chat about the latest TV, sports or news event at every opportunity.  Unfortunately these people can ruin on-site SEO for a thread simply by adding so much un-related content onto the page, for example a great thread about how to fix a bike puncture could be destroyed by a “copy & paste” joke from a mass email.

Other people on Forum can get really angry over little personal comments and points of view.  There can be whole slagging matches across many threads and more focus goes on the fallout than the actual topic of your site!

5 effective tips to fight to fight Forum spam

Here’s the round-up of tips to stop both types of spam.  Just one of these simple changes can transform your entire Forum into a powerful authority site on your chosen subject:

1) Make all links NoFollow – NoFollow links are Google’s way of combating Forum and Blog SEO spam.  You can automatically mark each link on a forum to have the code rel=”nofollow” within the <a> markup language and this makes the link practically useless towards SEO for spammers and self promoters.  Make sure the posts, signatures and the profiles all have the NoFollow tag, this will stop your website being held back by Google and your own out-bound links within the sidebars and footer will have more SEO power.

2) Add a post limit or a time limit for links – Many, many people worldwide are paid to go onto forums, create a link and then move onto the next one.  There are handy add-ons for Forum software such as vBulletin to put a time limit or a post count limit onto new profiles which only allows them to post a link after they have met the requirements.  This stops masses of online spam in my experience as adding the link suddenly become a commitment and not a quick fix like many SEO spammers wish.

3) Make registration harder – A lot of spam online is automatically generate by ‘bots‘, programs that do a repetitive task very quickly.  CAPCHA codes are one way to stop bots but there are programs that can actually solve most CAPCHA codes and teams working around them so they aren’t totally foolproof.  Using images of cats and dogs is our favorite CAPCHA, don’t use one which is too complex for your target market though – check out Microsoft’s Cat and Dog CAPCHA here.  Some Forums have a time limit to activate an account and some specialised one’s will not allow email address such as Gmail, YahooMail and Hotmail as these can be quickly created for free.

4) Have a section to talk about rubbish – If your forum has regulars (and all the best ones do) then allow them to talk about life, entertainment and news.  Ensure that there’s a part of the forum where they can rant about the latest football match, celebrity gossip or news from their life.  Ensure that this unrelated part of your Forum is within it’s own folder away from the rest of the related content, you can even block it from the search engines using robots.txt if you’re really worried about it.

5) Get Administrating – If there is someone annoying your forum members and being generally a thorn in the side then don’t hesitate and ban them from the forum.  If they are a regular then you can give out temporary bans on most Forum systems, if they are consistently upsetting people then you can block their IP address.  If an unrelated post finds it’s way into your main section of your forum then move it into a generic chatter section or delete it completely, this is your forum and you shouldn’t let people ruin it’s SEO power or usefulness! You can’t possibly man a forum 24 hours a day, 7 days a week so try giving power to regular members of the forum to ban members, move posts and delete spam, if you can get a good mix of worldwide forum admins then you can be spam free at all times of the day!

Good luck in the fight against spam; remember that Google has actually punished websites for not controlling spam levels by lowering their search engine position so spam prevention is an important part of SEO.

What it should be used for is enticing people to click on your listing in the search engine results. Let’s look at a typical Google search result for this site using the keyword “SEO Company”:

The Meta Description tag is shown in the Google listing, if you are unsure what the code looks like for the description tag then it is shown below:

This mini advert can gain a lot more clicks from search engine results if it’s written well. The best way to write the description is to simply describe your business and include your main keyword(s) within the text.

Any keywords within the Meta Description are automatically made bold which make them more likely to get clicked on by the average searcher.
See the example above for the search “SEO Company”, you can see the keywords are bolded by Google for both the Meta Title tag and the Meta Description tag.

Bing, Yahoo and Ask put more SEO weight upon the Meta Description tag, if you want to rank highly in a competitive market on these search engines then it is essential you optimise the Metas for every key page on your website.

What happens if you don’t use a Meta description tag?

Google ‘plucks’ out related content that is found on the page it’s displaying and uses these “snippets” to create a dynamic description.  Sometimes this is the best option as long-tail keywords will be brought into the description if they are within the text and become bold-type font.  The blog posts here on Real Web SEO don’t use Meta description tags for this very purpose, they can more easily win search results that rarely get searched for.

How long should the Meta description tag be in character length?

Google can hold around 150 characters before the content spills out of the search result boxes and becomes shortened by three dots (…).  There is no actual limit to how long or short the Meta tag can be, if you put in too many characters then expect Google to chose the favorite parts or just the first 150 characters.  A too small description can be a bad thing as you only take up one line in the search results instead of your allotted two; this may be harder to spot by users and will certainly contain less keywords that could be highlighted.

So go ahead and tweak your homepage’s Meta tags, it could make a significant difference.  You can always look at tags from professional websites by viewing their source code, perhaps sticking along the same lines will bring the best results for your site but make sure not to copy them word for word.

Instead of battling against time and competition companies could simply concentrate on making the site sell more products per visitor.  The conversion rate of a site is the percentage of people who do a desired action on a website such as buying a product, filling out a form or calling a telephone number for example.

There are many web design choices that can deter people from spending time on a website or from buying a product.  Unfortunately many web developers do not consider the customer when designing a site, their main aim is to develop the site, make the client happy and get paid.  When clients make bad decisions (see Clients From Hell!) that’s when conversions can go right out of the window, we’ve seen pink websites, websites that take a shocking 20 seconds to download and ecommerce sites with broken links and no product descriptions.

“4 seconds is the average time someone decides to stay on a website or not”

Our web design partners Juno have seen a 14% increase in sales just by testing out different images at the top of one of their clients sites.  This work took about 2 hours of development time and increased the client’s bottom line by an extra 14% a year, I’m not allowed to give specific figures but obviously this was a great investment!

If you are unsure how to create more sales per visitor on your website then look at the top players online such as Amazon, Ebay and Google, each one of these companies split tests for conversion optimisation on a daily basis constantly refining their sites (and profits!).

The main things Real Web SEO look at when doing conversion optimisation are:

1. How quickly the website loads
2. How clear it is to see what the website is offering
3. How easy it is to find the required information
4. How easy the website is to navigate
5. What feeling you get when entering the site (colours, images etc.)
6. How easy it is to buy the product or call the business
7. How trustworthy the site seems (especially on ecommerce)

There are hundreds of factors that can raise/lower a website’s conversion rate but the important point is to start with good web design practices and try to improve from there.  Not testing a website is a big mistake that we see again and again, it’s the cheapest way to improve profits and also one of the most effective.

PageRank is also known as “Link Juice” to SEO enthusiasts, every time a website links to your website they pass on some link power (link juice) and promotes your site up the search engine results.  You can get higher PageRank by gaining links from other sites but there’s a twist to the tale; a website with higher PageRank passes on more link juice than a low PageRank site.  In real terms this could mean that 1000 links from small personal websites could be worth the same value as one link from a news website!  You can imagine that everyday thousands of people would link to the latest gossip on news or magazine websites, every one of these links will pass on power onto the news websites and they have incredible PageRank power.

When a website links out to another website it doesn’t lose any power itself, it just gives out more power to the site it links too.  Let’s say a website had a PageRank power of 1000 and it linked to 5 external websites on it’s homepage, each website will be given a power of 200 (1000/5) and the original website will still have the power of 1000.

Another thing every SEO’er should know about PageRank is that each page is treated separately.  If everyone linked to a website’s homepage then this would receive all the power, if they all linked to an ‘inner’ sub-page then this that page, not the homepage would receive all the link power.

Once link power is added toward specific webpages that power will be passed within the internal links of the website. Now if you have an important homepage then you should ensure that every page on your website links back to the homepage and passes through a lot of link power to it.  Top selling items on an ecommerce store should perhaps be linked to in the sidebar on every page of the website, this would make that specific page rank higher in Google when the relevant keywords are searched for.  Categories are useful tools to pass on PageRank as they are usually linked to within navigation bars and/or footer links, a website selling different sports equipment can ensure that each sport has a relatively even amount of PageRank to each category page even if only certain sports are linked towards.

So if you are selling one product/service then focus your PageRank onto the main page of your website by linking to it from every other page and blog post.  If you have a range of products then create categories for your products and make sure that they are linked to from the main navigation bar and/or footer.  Best selling products/services should be linked to from every page on the website as well so they have more link power in Google’s search results.

The internal links of your website should also have descriptive Anchor text as that also plays a big role in SEO.  If you have a webpage about ‘Rainbow Umbrellas’ then link to it using the Anchor text “Rainbow Umbrellas” it’s simple!

I will be writing another blog post on Anchor text in the upcoming days so I’ll see you again soon,

Real Web SEO

Google also favours sites that have useful external links; it’s a semi-large ranking factor which many bloggers seem to miss out as they don’t want to lose traffic.

There IS a solution luckily, a perfect balance between the SEO benefits of the external link and the traffic leak.

The [target="_blank"] attribute

Make sure that if people do click on an external link on your site they’ll open a new window or tab on their browser and not overwrite the original window (A.K.A. your website!)

Unfortunately this attribute isn’t strict XHTML compilable which doesn’t really matter for SEO but could matter for web designers. You can use Javascript to do the same external link job if you want to make the W3C happy.