The domain name where your website resides at is an important part of your online identity. It represents your business in a vital way. Your domain name can have a big impact on the overall success of your website. It pays off to think hard before you choose a domain name. Ideally your domain name should reflect your business’s core activities, but just having your brand name as a domain name sometimes isn’t enough. Here I will outline some things to keep in mind when you venture out and register your first domain name. 1. Pick the right extension for your primary domain name. If you run a local business that’s not in the USA, it pays off to have a domain name with your country’s local extension. So if you’re a Dutch business primarily active in the Netherlands, stick with a .nl domain name. If you do business internationally or primarily in the USA, always go for a .com domain. Be sure to register your domain on multiple extensions to protect your online brand. Don’t rely on the .com only, also register .net, .org, .biz and .info. If you’re a European company, register the .eu as well. Register the .mobi and .asia just to be safe. You want to protect your domain name and make sure someone else doesn’t grab your domain with a different extension and starts competing with you. Have all these extra domain names point to your primary domain name where your website resides. 2. Make it easy to spell. If you have a very complicated domain name that’s hard to type, users will mistype it and get either an error or, if you’re unlucky, reach a different site entirely. So make sure your domain name is easy to type. This also helps when you have to spell it out on the phone to contacts and potential customers. If your company has a difficult name that won’t be easily spelled as a domain, consider registering a different domain name to put your website on. You should still register your brand name as a domain, but it might be a good idea to not have that be the primary address of your website. 3. Make it easy to remember. Try to pick a domain name that’s catchy and memorable so it will stick in people’s heads. If people can’t remember your domain they might just try to find your business by searching in Google, which is likely to lead them to your competitor’s websites. 4. Don’t hyphenate unless you really have to. Hyphens, like numbers, make it more difficult for you to spell out your domain name on the phone, and makes your domain more difficult to remember. Only use hyphens to prevent confusion. 5. Make it relevant. If you’re not using your brand name as your domain, make sure your domain name applies to your business. Try to use SEO keywords that describe your core business, but be sure to keep it short. Long domain names often don’t pass criteria 2 and 3. 6. Never use a subdomain or domain provided by your ISP. Always register your own domain name and arrange your own hosting environment. Nothing looks more amateurish than a business website on an ISP’s domain name like http://members.megaisp.com/~user101. A domain name with basic hosting is not expensive and it shows that you’ve at least put some effort into your website. 7. Register alternatives and misspellings. People make mistakes and will misremember or mistype your domain. If you own that mistyped version, you can still get that visitor to your site. Try to determine the most common variations and misspellings of your domain name and register those domains as well. 8. Avoid existing brand names or competitors. Many lawsuits have been fought over domain name ownership, and if you pick a domain name that resembles an existing business or brand too much you’re likely to find yourself on the wrong end of a legal settlement. Your domain name is not the be all, end all of your online presence, but it’s a big factor and deserves proper consideration. Also make sure you check out this great guide from FirstSiteGuide.com on how to choose the best domain name.

So you’re finally becoming successful online. It’s taken months and months of effort and dedication to design, develop, and launch your website, and then many more months and months of effort and dedication to make that website successful. And it’s working! Traffic figures are booming and you’re generating more revenue every day! The problem is, back when you launched the website you chose a cheap, small hosting package. After all money was scarce in those early days and you couldn’t afford a big dedicated hosting contract. You didn’t even know if your website was going to take off at all, let alone become a smashing success. So your small hosting package doesn’t suffice any more. Your website receives more traffic than the package was designed for, and your hosting company wants you to upgrade. Now, tell me, how would you prefer your hosting company to inform you of the need to upgrade? Do you prefer this approach? Or this approach? Hi there!First of all, congratulations! We’re seeing massive traffic coming in on your [domain.com] website, which can only mean your site is becoming a big success. Well done!However, we’re afraid we might have some bad news for you. The hosting package you have with us only allows for bandwidth usage of [X]GB a month, and right now you’re using [Y]GB a month. Additionally, all this extra traffic to your site is slowing down the other websites on your shared hosting environment, which we’re sure you’ll understand is not entirely fair on the owners of those websites.But no fear, we have a solution! We can migrate your website to a dedicated hosting environment, and ensure the switch will be as smooth and hassle-free as possible. That way your website can grow unhindered, and no other sites will be affected negatively by your continued online success!All we ask is that you sign up for our upgraded Dedicated Hosting package at $xx.xx a month (or one lump sum of $yy.yy for the whole year, saving you Z%), and we can guarantee that your website’s traffic can continue to grow undisturbed.Sign up now through your hosting control panel, or get in touch with our sales department at 123-4567890 to talk about what we can to do contribute to your website’s success.Kind regards, Hosting Company support No contest really, is it? A hosting company that unilaterally throttles your website when you become too successful is only interested in its own bottom line, and doesn’t care about its customers. They’ll find this an increasingly untenable business ethos. Find a hosting company that doesn’t kill your website at the first sight of a traffic spike, but instead tries to accommodate your success. Because such a hosting company knows that by enabling your success, they’ll be enabling their own.

So you’re thinking of redoing your existing website, or perhaps you don’t have a site yet and want to set one up. One of the first questions that you’ll face is whether to build and maintain your website in-house, or to hire an external agency to do it for you. What approach works best depends on many factors. Do It Yourself Building a website yourself by hand is a pretty daunting task. You need a solid grasp of HTML, CSS and possibly JavaScript and other languages. Additionally you need to be familiar with the basic concepts of web design if you want your site to look at least vaguely professional. If you have the time and appropriate skills, building a website by hand is the cheapest and most flexible option. All you need is a good web host and off you go. Most of us however won’t have the necessary skills to build a functional and decent-looking website. Do It Yourself, Advantages: Cheap Total control over your site The sky’s the limit Do It Yourself, Disadvantages: Solid HTML and CSS skills are absolutely necessary It’ll consume a lot of your time Web Publishing / Content Management Systems With the abundance of user-friendly web publishing software available online these days it’s a tempting choice to use one of these and build a website yourself. Systems like WordPress, Squarespace and Wix make it look easy to design and build your own website in a matter of minutes. Many webhosting companies also offer easy-to-use web content management systems, but these often turn out to be very basic systems that won’t get you very far. The uncomfortable truth however is that everyone can build a website with these tools, but building a good website takes a lot of time and effort. Web publishing systems can help make it easier for you by providing design templates, easy layout options, and intuitive admin functions, but in the end you’ll still have to invest a lot of your time, and potentially money, to get the most out of it. Every easy-to-use web publishing systems has its limits and constraints, usually necessary to ensure it remains accessible to non-techie users. You’ll also be forced to work with the design elements the tool provides you with, which can mean your site looks similar to other websites out there. A way around this is to have a unique design made for you. This doesn’t have to be an expensive option – unique WordPress designs for example can be had for a few hundred dollars or less. Web Publishing, Advantages: Easy to set up Easy to use (mostly) Professional design templates are widely available With plugins you can add all kinds of functionality to many web publishing systems Web Publishing, Disadvantages: Not all systems are free to use A truly unique design will probably cost you money Each system has its limitations in terms of flexibility and functionality Getting to know your tool and building a good site will take time Hire an External Web Agency If your pockets are deep enough and/or your time limited, hiring an external agency to build your website for you is a viable option. But don’t just hire any agency – shop around and compare. Many agencies are barely more than a programmer and a salesman working out of someone’s basement, and they won’t be able to deliver proper long-term service and support. When looking for a web agency to outsource your website to, keep the following things in mind: Does the agency have an excellent website? For web agencies their own website should be a prime demonstration of their skills. It needs to be as good as they can make it. If you’re not blown away by their own site, they may not have the necessary capabilities to build a truly great website for you. Do they use a lot of technical jargon? Abundant use of web-speak may be a means of hiding their lack of expertise. You want an agency that speaks your language and can communicate their ideas to you in a straight-forward manner. Does their offer match their price? As in all industries with web agencies you often get what you pay for, but sometimes an agency might take advantage of a new client’s lack of online experience. Don’t commit to a website costing tens of thousands of dollars until you’re totally sure they’re the right people for the job. Do they offer good (and affordable) support? Building a website isn’t the end of the process, you’ll need proper support from the agency to keep the site up-to-date and error-free. Ensure that the support they deliver after the new website is live is part of the contract, and don’t let them charge huge maintenance fees either. If you’re paying more each year in maintenance cost than your website originally cost, you’re being ripped off. External Agency, Advantages: All the hard work is done for you A good agency can supplement your own ideas and come up with even better concepts Your website will be unique and (hopefully) effective External Agency, Disadvantages: It’s the most expensive option – by far You run the risk of being stuck with a mediocre agency and an under-performing website

On November 24th I gave a talk at the annual SAScon mini-conference about SEO for Ecommerce. As usual the conference was superbly organised with a good range of topics from a variety of speakers, and I was grateful for the opportunity to speak in front of a great crowd. I wrote a detailed blog post for State of Search where I expand on many of the points I made in my talk, and I gave an expanded talk on the same topic at the Think Visibility 7 conference, the slides for which are embedded below: SEO for Ecommerce

There are all sorts of challenges when dealing with international SEO, such as what domain extension to use, how to structure multiple target countries on a single domain, dealing with country selection without losing link value, how to build incoming links across all countries, and so on. There have never been any hard rules on how search engines deal with international SEO, leaving optimisers with trial and error exercises to discover the right approach for their sites. Now Google is lending a helping hand with an extensive post on their Webmaster Central blog, which explains how they attempt to handle different geotargeting factors such as domains & subdomains, directory structure, and Webmaster Tools settings. For experienced SEOs there aren’t many surprises: Country-level domains are important and probably the best way to target different countries if you can spare the expense. Subdomains are a good alternative, as are country-specific directories on your website. Duplicate content issues have plagued international SEOs since the dawn of the web. Often it’s extremely hard to avoid duplicate content when your business operates internationally in Europe. Many countries use the same language, so if you want to effectively target all your operating markets you will eventually end up duplicating content in the same language for different countries. Google doesn’t recommend hiding this duplicate content with robots.txt or noindex tags – I’ve never been a fan of hiding content in this way either, as every page on your website may convey some ranking benefit and I feel you should let search engines crawl the full length and breadth of your content. What you should do is pick one ‘preferred’ version (ideally the version with the largest target market) and ensure all duplicate versions of that content use the canonical tag to point to the preferred version. Google does have one interesting revelation though in their geotargeting recommendations: “Note that we do not use locational meta tags (like “geo.position” or “distribution”) or HTML attributes for geotargeting. While these may be useful in other regards, we’ve found that they are generally not reliable enough to use for geotargeting.” (Emphasis added) This might mean that the ‘lang’ HTML attribute conveys no geotargeting benefit, though it’s undoubtedly a useful attribute for browsers and other UAs and helps with multilingual websites. In upcoming blog posts Google will take a look at multilingual websites and special situations with global websites, so I recommend keeping a sharp eye on the Webmaster Central blog, and I’ll be discussing things here as well.

Last week the inaugural Friends of Search conference took place in Amsterdam, and I was honoured to be asked to speak there. In front of a few hundred of the best and brightest search marketers in the Netherlands I gave a talk about personalised search – and specifically, about why personalised search results can be a bad thing. It was doubly exciting for me as this was the first time I got to use our new brand in a presentation – we soft-launched The Tomorrow Lab brand last week, and have kicked it off properly today. As usual I uploaded the slides from my talk to Slideshare, so you can view them online: For a first-time conference Friends of Search was very well organised, with a great schedule packed full of top notch speakers. I managed to catch quite a few talks myself, and I especially enjoyed Marcus Tandler’s light-speed keynote about the future of search, Fili Wiese and Kaspar Szymanski’s tag-team talks about Google penalties and reconsideration requests, Bastian Grimm’s sobering talk on WordPress security, and Kevin Gibbons’ overview of the state of content marketing. The #fos14 hashtag saw abundant use and there was plenty of live-tweeting, and the hashtag is still in active use as round-up posts from the event are being published on various blogs and news sites. Another nice wee thing the organisers did was record short video interviews with all the speakers, which allows people who couldn’t attend to get a sample of the various talks on offer. Below you can see my video interview, and all interviews are available on the Friends of Search website here. All in all I think Friends of Search was a top notch conference and a great addition to the Dutch digital events calendar, and I’m looking forward to next year’s edition! P.S. Friends of Search also gave me an answer to the question “how many Google fans does it take to balance Google-skeptic Barry Adams?” The answer, judging from the conference’s morning schedule, is four. ;)

SEO Dojo-member ‘Doc’ Sheldon Campbell has compiled a substantial ebook, containing insights from over 30 experienced search engine optimisers and digital marketers. The book, entitled “Critical Thinking for the Discerning SEO”, is now available via Doc Sheldon’s website: “Critical Thinking for the Discerning SEO will give you insights from some of the top names in the business, on how to focus your efforts where they’ll give you real benefit, rather than chasing every shiny penny offered by self-proclaimed gurus and experts.” In addition to contributions from SEO luminaries such as Danny Sullivan, Rand Fishkin, Bill Slawski, and Alan Bleiweiss, yours truly also contributed to the book. Go forth and grab it – all the proceeds will go to charity so it’ll benefit a good cause as well!

I usually don’t publish guest posts here, but this one is the result of a very well-crafted blogger outreach email that I felt warranted a reward. I take no responsibility for the quality or accuracy of the article – though obviously I think it has some merit otherwise I wouldn’t publish it. Enjoy: Link building has been a vital aspect of SEO since the late 1990’s. If a business wants their page to rank highly in search engines like Google,  it needs relevant and high-quality links pointing to the business’s site. This makes link building a vital part of SEO to significantly improve your rankings. There is a vast range of link building techniques, from forum posting to blog commenting, and there are a number of tricks of the trade to take advantage of. But today’s modern link builder relies in large part on blogger outreach. Link building is a continuing process which is time-consuming and whether you carry it out in-house or via freelancers, finding new blogging opportunities can be difficult. Here’s how to make your blogger outreach simple and straightforward: 1. Finding guest blogging opportunities There is an extensive array of online blogging resources and the key is to find them. Great sites include Blog dash, MyBlogGuest or even Google itself, but in our experience Technorati is the best. Basically it is a directory of blogs and all the bloggers are genuine and passionate about what they write, so this means they are real and authentic. It also means they are more inclined to take on guest posts with without needing a financial incentive. 2. Content is king Finding a great blog to get a link on is only half the work- it is the content which will be published on it which will really seal the deal. Content is the buzzword on everyone’s lips at the moment and it is crucial when trying to link build. The quality needs to be relevant, engaging, unique and informative so the article concepts are important. If you are struggling to think of ideas on what to write about, Flipboard is a great tool to stir the creative juices. Or alternatively, you can check out Article Teller which lets you order content and you only pay for the content when you are completely happy with it. If someone writes you an article for a blog and you aren’t happy with the quality, you simply don’t pay for it! Remember, everyone struggles with writer’s block at times but always bear in mind the audience, purpose and if in doubt, try to make it topical on anything that is currently going on such as a national event. 3. No Repetition It can be easy to become too comfortable and get lazy to publish content on the same sites time and time again so you need to steer clear of repetition. Search engines like Google look for patterns so avoid repeating the same processes for months on end. How do I track all the sites I’ve published on? Excel is great for this and conditional formatting can be used to highlight duplicate cells to keep on top of the sites used. Blogger outreach is a fantastic marketing technique and is a great way to contribute to the online conversation and give something back to the internet community. Benefit from these tools to ease your link building process. This article was written by Custard Media, a reputable and experienced digital media agency in North-west England. Speak to the specialists today for high quality, expert SEO services.

Many small business owners that have a poor website don’t realize they have a poor website. This is often the case when: A) they’ve put a lot of time and effort into building their website themselves, or… B) a friend or family member claiming to be a web expert has built the site for them, or… C) they spent a lot of money on a ‘professional’ web developer. Due to the investment of time and money and emotional attachment they’re unable to look objectively at their website and see its flaws. When asked about the success of their website they usually answer that they’re quite pleased with it. Sometimes I get the uncomfortable task of explaining to one of them that no, really, your site could do with some improvement. I usually try to drill down to the core of the issue by asking them what the purpose of their website is. What is the goal? What is your website supposed to be doing for you? Many business owners haven’t set any goals for their website, they’re just happy to be online. Very few look at their web statistics regularly. Even fewer act upon the information. A typical conversation on this topic goes something like this: “So, what is the goal of your website? What do you want to accomplish with it?” “Well, I want my information to be out there, to show my products online.” “Okay, so why do you want people to look at your products?” “To make them aware of what I can do for them.” “I see. So when they see your products on your website, what do you want them to do with that information?” “Well, I’d like them to pick up the phone or send me an email or whatever. Get in touch.” “So your website is meant to generate leads, is it?” “Yeah, basically, that’s it.” “And how many leads are you getting from your website every week?” “… I don’t know. One or two I think, I’m not sure.” “Okay, let’s assume it’s two leads a week. How many people visit your website every week?” “Well, eh, I’d have to look that up.” “I see here on your web statistics package that you get about six hundred visitors a week.” “Oh, well, that’s good. That sounds like a lot.” “Only two of them are getting in touch with you. Two out of six hundred, that’s not a very high percentage, is it?” “… Eh, I suppose not, no.” That’s the beginning of a slow, painful path from ignorance to denial, anger, frustration, and awareness. Ideally this ends in acceptance of the inconvenient truth that a good website requires constant attention. If you want to make the most of your online presence, you need to commit a certain amount of time and money to it. The good news is that it doesn’t require countless hours and infinitely deep pockets to maintain a solid website. A lot of things can be done easily and cheaply and can yield tremendous results. So ask yourself, are you happy with your website? Should you be?

But do you really? Is it necessary to be on every social media site and shout your message as loud as you can in to as many microphones as you can find? Social media websites are not ends in and of themselves – they are a means to an end. For most users social media sites are channels to connect with friends, relatives and colleagues, to read relevant news and keep up to date with stuff that interests them. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are the digital equivalent of conversations with friends and acquaintances. This means that commercial messages aren’t really welcome. It’s important to realise that on social media websites the user controls the content – what they read, what they share, what they ignore. Commercial messages are considered interruptive and unwelcome. That’s why as a company, when you do decide to build your presence on Twitter or Facebook or any other social media website, you need to adapt your voice to the medium. People who are interested in Ford cars don’t want to read loads of hyped sales tweets straight out of car dealer brochures. What they might be interested in is advance information about upcoming Ford cars, inside knowledge of Ford’s R&D, or just to see a human face behind that monolithic corporate image. The people at Ford know this, so their Twitter account isn’t just a faceless PR machine. It’s run by actual people who have conversations with their followers and provide tweets that are interesting. This has proven to be a successful approach for them – the Ford Twitter account has over 25 thousand followers. On Facebook the overall tone is even more informal and social. Where Twitter is becoming a networking tool, people ‘hang out’ on Facebook with friends and family. That’s why success on Facebook depends mostly on how you approach your audience. While some companies have the benefit of a corporate image that lends itself well to Facebook (Nike for example whose various FB pages boast tens of thousands of fans), for other companies it can be quite challenging to build a strong presence. They key is to deliver what your fans want. Nike uses Facebook to share cool videos, ask for user input, and launch contests where participants can win great swag. If all you’re pushing on Facebook is the same sales material as you send by email, you’re not on the right track. Get personal, be authentic, and ask for feedback. Listen to your fans and give them what they ask for. When you do decide to start tweeting or build a Facebook page, make sure you define for yourself what you want to get out of it. Your goal can be anything from fuzzy marketing stuff like brand-building to solid ROI metrics such as more visitors to your website that convert in to customers. Sometimes you’ll find that a certain popular social media site just doesn’t work for you. And that’s OK. Social media sites, for all the hype surrounding them, are just channels that you can use for the benefit of your company’s bottom line. If you can’t get any value out of them, don’t use them. For every social media site that you think can add value, ask yourself the following questions: Is my target audience present? And do they want to hear what I have to say? As long as you set your expectations and manage your social media presence accordingly, you’ll be OK. Just don’t be social for social’s sake. Whatever you do with social media, make sure it means something. UPDATE 16 Feb: I came across an excellent case study from Microsoft Advertising on how they successfully deployed social media. It’s a great read and definitely worth your while: » Microsoft Social Media White Paper – Learn & Earn [PDF]

(This article was originally published in the Belfast Telegraph on 3 June 2010. It’s been modified slightly for this blog.) In his forthcoming book The Shallows author Nicholas Carr argues that surfing the web has a negative impact on how we think. He quotes research stating that exposure to bite-sized chunks of information, from short videos and blog posts to tweets and Facebook updates, trains our brain to prefer this type of information. As a result we are losing the ability to focus on a single thing for longer periods of time. This is not a new argument – in an article for The Atlantic magazine in 2008 titled “Is Google making us stupid?” Carr laid out the groundwork for his upcoming book. In a recent blog post Carr outlines a specific aspect of how the nature of the internet affects how we consume information: Links embedded in a text distract us from fully reading and comprehending the text. Instead of linking to other web pages from within the text, Carr wants us to start putting links at the bottom of a piece of online content. As with his original article for the Atlantic, this latest blog post has not gone unnoticed by his critics. Clay Shirky, another notable author and web guru, stands firmly on the opposite side of the debate, claiming that the internet is a force for good. The web, he argues, allows for a wider spread of information than ever before, and has enabled an entirely new means of engaging with politics and society. As a web professional spending close to 10 hours a day online, saying bad things about the internet runs counter to my livelihood. Yet I too cannot deny the fact that my mind works differently now than it did 15 years ago when I discovered the internet. Many of the symptoms outlined by Carr are eerily familiar to me, such as the big gaps between short- and long-term memories and an increasing inability to concentrate on a single thing for a long stretch of time. I’m not sure if this is an entirely bad thing, though. The internet works in a certain way, and perhaps our brains are adapting to this online landscape to allow us to perform better in it. We’re developing new skills and new ways of thinking so we can deal more effectively with a globally connected world. Perhaps this type of hypercharged multitasking mindset is exactly what we need to succeed in modern times. But at the same time I share some of Carr’s concerns that maybe we are losing something in the process. The question, then, is whether what we stand to gain measures up to what we might lose.