What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet. – Shakespeare

Seriously though what is in a name? Does such a small thing matter? Yes and no.

Look around. Its a very busy world. Ads all over. TV, radio, internet, newspaper, magazine and what not. What do they all have in common? Short, simple, catchy phrases. Do you know where I’m heading with this?

Now before we even start with having a little catchy tagline for your site or blog, we’ll have to deal with the name. So, yes names do matter (especially on the web) unless you would rather listen to the ancient playwright.

I personally have a hard time finding a decent name. I keep changing my mind more than I change gears while driving standard. A true fact. And I honestly know how hard it is when you finally find the perfect name only to find out the domain is taken.

Alright lets assume you have a domain and you’ve got a better one to work with. Now what? The fear of losing traffic and SEO. Well no worries. You can always do a 301 redirect using .htaccess.

Open up Notepad, paste the following and upload it to your root directory. It works like magic.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yournewdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

Now its very important that you make sure that this file is named .htaccess (no extentions like .txt or anything). And lets just hope this time you’ve picked a better domain.

Register domains for long periods

Google (and other search engines) penalizes sites with domains that are going to expire soon. And you should always buy domains for long periods (like 2-3 years) because search engines look at the domain’s stability and spam sites often buy their domains for short periods.

It won’t cost you a fortune to buy the domain for a few extra years, but it will be worth it.

Does TLD matter?

Nope. It doesn’t matter to Google which TLD you’re using. That’s good, huh? I’ve seen a lot of people say that Google prefers .coms but that’s not the case. And one more thing, Matt Cutts was saying that Google might penalize .infos because they’re mostly used by spam sites.

You get the old PR if you buy the domain

Wrong! Google resets the PR and doesn’t count the old backlinks when you buy the domain (whether it was expired or if you bought it directly from the owner). Well it should be a bit obvious. Why would someone wanna give you credit for something you didn’t do?

BTW, there are ways to keep the old PR. You need to buy the domain directly from the owner. Make sure that it isn’t about to expire. Don’t change the content and design right away. You’ll have to do it slowly or else Google will just reset the PR because its not relevant to the site anymore. And make sure that you don’t change the registrant details right away. Change it one by one (ex: email address, name, phone, etc).

Moving site to a new domain

Don’t worry you can “safely” move your site to a new domain by using a 301 redirect. You’ll have to do it by putting this small code in your .htaccess file.

Redirect 301 / http://www.NEW-SITE.com/

Keyword in the domain

Does Google like domains with keywords in them? Yes it does. So, it would come in handy if you could have an important keyword in the domain. But, don’t make it long and ugly. Take a look at this if you need help choosing a great domain.

Check the domain’s past

Some domains might have a horrible past. You wanna check it before you buy the domain. The domain could’ve been banned by search engines (maybe for spam or adult content). Just go to the Wayback Machine and do a quick search.

Also see if it had some heavy link exchanging (aka link farm). Link farms get banned by search engines. So, you better watch out.

Okay that’s it. This should get you started. Just remember not to go crazy for a high PR or backlinks. Be honest and play safe. Oh and take a look at WebsiteGrader (it scores your SEO).

There are lots of options for your permalinks. Like you could add the date, category, title, etc. I suggest using the one with description and keywords in it. And this format seems to do the job: /%category%/%postname%/

Well in simple words. That format will display the URLs like this: www.example.com/category/post-title/

Wondering why its better? Well its because search engines like keywords in the URLs, plus it would also help you get a better SERP.

Feel free to let me (and other readers) know if you’ve got something better in mind.

How it works

You basically link to another site and that site links back to you. And that’s a link exchange. But its not as simple as it looks like. You need to do more than that.

And I don’t recommend you doing this two-way link exchange. Its not going to benefit you. This is dead!’

A better way of exchanging links

Reciprocal links (its where site A links to site B and site B links to site A) suck. Search engines don’t really like that. But you can try this method. Find someone who has a few good sites. Exchange links with them. Lets say you own site A. So, site A links to site C and site B links to site A. Plus make sure that the sites are related to yours.

Well now it doesn’t look like a link exchange and search engines will value those links more. Its just my way of a three-way link exchange.

Where to exchange links

Don’t exchange links with each and every site. Be picky! Only exchange links with sites that are related to yours. Also make sure that the other site has a PR or even a better PR than you and it has more traffic than yours.

And also check how many links the other site has. If it has a lot of links (like more than 5) then don’t exchange with that site. That site is considered a link farm. Too many links will get you penalized by search engines (especially Google).

How many links to exchange

Now we don’t know the exact number of links you can exchange before you get penalized. And I wouldn’t even recommend that you try to find out. But be reasonable. Like 2-5 links seem reasonable. More than that will probably be bad for you.

Where/when to stop

Like I said before don’t build a link farm. That will really hurt your SEO and PR. And also link exchange isn’t exact science. It might work for you. Or it might not. But if you want then you can give it a shot. Just make sure that you don’t go past a reasonable amount.

And if you see that you’re not getting any visitors from the sites you exchanged links with and your PR just went down. Then take off their links and you ask them to take yours off too. That means link exchange didn’t work for you because you probably did something wrong.

Well good luck! And if you have any questions then feel free to ask.

Why shared IPs suck!

Lets say you are using a shared IP. A webmaster uses black hat methods to get traffic and gets banned from search engines. And the site was hosted on the same IP/server as you are. Now search engine don’t just ban the domain, but they ban the whole IP range. That means your site just got banned too. (Oh shit!)

Not a good thing is it? Well you can prevent this by getting a dedicated IP. That means you’ll be the only one using that IP. So you won’t have to worry about getting banned because of someone else’s fault.

How to get one?

Well most dedicated servers come with one. But dedicated servers are pretty expensive (starting from $50/month). Wait. Some shared hosts also give you the ability to add a dedicated IP for a few extra bucks per month (starting from $3).

One of the hosts that I’ve seen which gives you this ability is GoDaddy. Their economy hosting plan is $4.29/month and the dedicated IP is $2.99/month. A total of $7.29/month. Not bad, huh?

Should you get one?

Absolutely. If you care about your site and want it to succeed then you should get it ASAP. Its not that expensive. Just a few extra dollars per month but its worth it.

ccTLD

Now I’m assuming that you have a bit of basic SEO done. Okay first of all, you need your ccTLD (country code top level domain). Like United States has .us, UK has .co.uk and Canada has .ca. Got it? Now if you don’t know your ccTLD then check this out.

Local Web Host

Now you know what your ccTLD is. So go get one. Like mysite.co.uk or something. After you’ve done that look for a local web host. You need to make sure that they are hosted in the same country as you are. It might cost a bit more but its worth it (at least for SEO purposes).

And that’s it. Yep! Its that simple. Told you, it wasn’t rocket science. Just be patient and do some general SEO and advertising and you’ll get the sweet results pretty soon.

First of all, we all know that people love free stuff! Yeah you can’t say that people don’t like free stuff. People will even take the crappiest thing, if its free. So, I think you know what I’m going to say. Yeah give some free stuff to people. Now it doesn’t have to be something big or like something that you will have to ship it to them. Give them something like a template, fonts, scripts, e-books and there are tons of stuff that you can give them. People really appreciate free stuff. Well sometimes there might be an exception. Lets not talk about that.

You want your blog to have it’s own domain name which is pretty easy to remember. Now of course, it would be pretty difficult to remember a long URL and you can also say that it is a negative side. And you want to blog about something particular. But then again it’s not always possible, like I blog about a lot of different things but they are somewhat related. But try to stick to a general topic like technology. Where you might write only about cameras or you could even talk about cameras, cellphones, computers, etc. But I would also suggest that you don’t blog on stuff like dragons. Because you wouldn’t really have a lot to right about them.

Another thing that you could do is, comment on other blogs. Now I’m talking about comments which are relevant to the post and not spam. When you comment on other blogs (especially popular ones), people might like your comments and then visit your blog if there is link. Or you could even provide a URL to a post that you wrote and it’s related to the post on the other blog(s).

There are tons of things you could do. But what really matters is that if your content is good or not. Your blog has to provide the best information on the topic that you write about and not just be a good one.

Okay for example you are selling something. I don’t know what you are selling but you are selling stuff online. And you want a lot of people visiting your online store. But what’s the point of getting a huge amount of traffic if no one really buys your product? Like they visit your site and just go away. Yeah do you get it now? You want a good quality of traffic. Don’t think about quantity. You want people who will buy your product (it’s called target audience, I think). You could get like 10 people on average every month that buy your product rather than a thousand visitors just visiting your site. So, which one is better?

Now I just wanted to let people know about this. Well think of it like the basic concept behind SEO. Okay I’m not going to tell you how you could get a good quality of traffic. You know the answer already, but all this time you probably were thinking about getting lots and lots of traffic. I suggest that you look for quality, not quantity when you really want a successful site and not just a site with tons of visitors.

WordPress does give you the ability to customize your permalink which is good if you want to make sure that your visitors can remember it. But you need to do a little more than that to make your WordPress powered blog search engine optimized. I would first suggest that you install a plugin called All in One SEO Pack which optimizes your titles for search engines, adds meta tags, etc. It really makes your blog search engine friendly.

Search engines like Google lets you give XML sitemaps to them. A sitemap helps search engines navigate through a site and index it. So, I would suggest that you install this plugin called Google XML Sitemaps which automatically creates sitemaps of your blog. Another thing that would help is FeedBurner which notifies search engines when you post and it even has some great features like tracking your subscribers, letting you add social bookmarking buttons, making your RSS more compatible, etc. You would also need to install a plugin named FeedBurner FeedSmith which is needed to work with FeedBurner.

Those are just one of the great ways you can make your WordPress powered blog search engine optimized and one little secret is that Google loves blogs. I’m telling this because I’ve noticed that if you have a search engine optimized blog and your posts get indexed few minutes after you have published it while it takes days, weeks or even months for a site to appear on Google.

Confused how it works? For example, you sell herbal shampoo on your site and like everyone else you would want to get more customers. But, you can only get a certain amount of people to know about your site. And you don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on advertising your site. So, how do you get more visitors? It’s simple, when someone is interested in buying herbal shampoo, but he/she doesn’t know about a company or site that sells them, they would probably use a search engine like Google to search and find one.

People wouldn’t want to waste their time looking through all the search results. So, you would want to make sure that your site comes up at the top of the search result and like that the searcher would visit your site first. This is how you could get more visitors and some might actually be interested in your herbal shampoo and order a few of them. But, it’s not so easy to show up on top of all search results related to your range of products. There would be other sites that would also want to be on top.

How could you make sure that your site appears on top? Well it depends on which search engine you are targeting. But, the basic trick would be to make your site search engine friendly by using meta data, making sure that your site’s other pages can be easily accessed from the home-page and having valid codings.

Well the things I mentioned above are only the basic. There is a lot of other tricks and technologies for SEO, but there is also organic or natural and black hat or spamdexing SEO. Black hat SEO could get you on top of search results easily and maybe faster, but your site will get banned from the search engines at some point and may not appear on search engine results ever again. While organic SEO has no risks and will keep you on top for a longer period.

Today, thousands of sites are created daily and SEO could help you drive more traffic to your site. Then again SEO could be difficult and sometimes a risky process. Not everyone can get the skills.

Useful Links:

SEO Tips & Tricks – Check this out for some great discussion on SEO (from the basics to the advanced)