Hi, I run a print and website design company (http://www.thedigitallion.com). I am currently struggling with optimizing my own site for search engines due to the vast amount of competition that I have. Here is my question: I know that the domain name you have has an effect on your placement, but I don't really want to give up my domain because it does have a PR of 2 and I have had it registered for many years now. I was wondering if I purchased a domain that has my keyword inside it such as (example) websitedesign.com and forwarded that to my website if it would have an effect on my rankings? If not, is there anything that I can do with this other domain to increase my rankings (preferably without purchasing hosting on that domain name). Thanks and regards, Ryan
Hi, Anyone know the answer to this? If you purchase a domain with your keywords in it and forward it to your domain will it show up in search results or does it only work if you have content on that domain name? Is there any way to get this domain to work in your favour? Ryan
Buying a new domain and forwarding the new domain to the old one is NOT going to help you... The new domain will have no inbound links so it is not going to rank for anything. If you 301 redirect the new domain to the old one then the new domain will never even appear in Google's index even if people DO link to it. The old domain will get credit for all of the new domain's existing links and that domain will not match searches for "web design". Having a keyword in your domain name is NOT as big a deal as people make it out to be. The only time it really seems to help is on exact matches (for example, a site named keyword1keyword2.com might automatically rank well for searches for "keyword1 keyword2" but even that is no guarantee). The reason domain names that exactly match a keyword phrase rank so well is that most people will link to your site with the name of your site (example if your site is www.example.com) or your actual URL like http://www.example.com/ (which if you look in Google's WMT you can see they interpret that link text to be "http www example com" after they normalize it removing punctuation and special characters). You need to find a way to build links to your URL with the keywords you want it to rank for as the link text. So if you want to rank for "web design" then farm links similar to: Don't make EVERY link use "Web Design" as the link text... But most should use that exact phrase you want to rank for. Others should use slight variations like "web designer", "web designers", "web design firm", "web design services", etc. PS: You are competing in a VERY competitive market... On Google I see 350,000,000 results for "web design", and 241,000,000 for "website design". You may want to consider looking for some long tail phrases a little easier to rank for like "SEO Friendly Web Design" which has 1,480,000 results.
Hi Ryan, Changing your domain name to preferred keyword doesn't help much. Do some onsite optimization on your internal pages naming, linking among other pages, keyword rich contents, meta tags on title, description and keywords for each page. Also, don't give too much outbound links to other sites from your website especially dofollow links. Next, is the most important thing to do - build more quality backlinks especially anchored keyword dofollow backlinks from high PR pages or sites with minimal total outbound links. Continue to do this and you shall see your ranking increases. I must admit with canonical that it is a very competitive niche and I suggest the same for going after long tail keywords for beginning. I have been working on "Work At Home" keyword that have more than 3 million monthly search for nearly 6 months now. I able to push the position from 400+ to 17 now. Just, make sure you don't get links from bad neighbourhoods that have massive spam links.
Hi, Thanks, both of you, for your insights. Can you tell me what you mean by dofollow links? Also, there must be something one can do with multiple domains to increase rankings. Whenever I search for something like "flash website design" something like flashwebsitedesign.com comes up. The domain I want with my keywords in it is available, but as I said, my current one - thedigitallion.com - does have a page rank of two, backlinks, and it has been registered for two years which I've heard improves rankings. Ryan
All hyperlinks are by default "dofollow" or "followed" links... It means basically that they can be counted by the search engines as a backlink to the target of the link. It also means that the site which has the link on it is "vouching" for the site that they are linking to... In other words, the site where the link is located is saying they "trust" the site they are linking to. When you link to another site with a "dofollow" or "followed" link, you take responsibility for the link. If the site you're linking to turns out to be violating Google's Webmaster Guidelines and they are caught, Google can not only penalize the site with the violations, but they can also penalize any sites giving the bad sites "dofollow" or "followed" links for helping to promote a bad site. This happened a LOT when blogs first came about. Spammers would comment on blog posts and plant links in their comments back to porn or gambling sites which were notorius for blackhat SEO techniques. So the search engines invented the rel="nofollow" attribute that can be added to an <a> (anchor) link element to say, "I'm allowing the link to this site but do not count my link as a backlink to that site. I'm not willing to vouch for the site or be responsible for promoting them should they be caught violating Google webmaster guidelines." Almost all blogs these days automatically add rel="nofollow" or rel="external nofollow" attributes to their comment links to avoid being penalized should a blackhat spammer plant a link there pointing to a bad neighborhood site. The alternative is to moderate all blog comments before allowing them to show on the site. If you look at a comment and don't trust the site they are pointing to then delete the comment (don't publish it). There are several ways to make links "nofollow" links: 1) Add rel="nofollow" to <a> element like <a href="TargetURL" rel="nofollow">link text</a> to make an individual link a nofollow link. 2) Add <meta name="robots" content="nofollow"> to the <head> of a page to make all links on the page nofollow links. 3) Add an Disallow: to your robots.txt file for the page in question. Like #2 this will make all links on the page nofollow. Unlike #2 it will also make the page noindex. You can find help at Google on nofollow if you need more info.
Thanks, that's good to know. You sure know a lot about this stuff. I am just not sure what to do with my other domain name. I always thought that forwarding the domain name would work. Would one have to buy hosting on both domains to benefit from the keywords within them? Ryan
Also, if I get high PR links to improve search engine positioning, should they be linked to my homepage if I want to increase the page rank of my homepage? Or does it increase the PR of my homepage as well as the inner pages by having links to inner pages? Ryan