What every web designer should know about SEO, part 4

Domain Names

Choosing Domain Names

Now that you have narrowed your keyword list, the next thing you need to do is to search for available Domain Names containing your keyword phrases. A domain name is the name -- optionally prepended with "www." -- that visitors will type into their browsers to find you, such as www.vtc.com to find my publisher, or www.geekmanuals.com to find my web site.

There are a number of services that make it easy (and fun!) to search for available domain names. Enter “domain name registration” into Google to find a handful of them. Search around for the best prices.

There are two reasons why your choice of a domain name is so important.

1. Search engines and Directories assume the domain name is relevant to keywords contained in the name and will give you a boost in their rankings.
    
2. Having your keywords in your Domain Name will improve your rankings for queries including the keyword phrases.

When researching available domain names, don’t rule out names containing dashes, especially if your desired name is already taken. Domain names containing dashes sometimes fare better in the search results than those without. Some search systems actually prefer domain names with dashes. It’s also easier to find available domains containing your keywords if you use dashes.

1. new-york-dentist.com
2. new-zealand-bike-adventures.com

It’s also possible to get good results with names containing double-dashes separating keywords.

If your desired domain name is already taken in the .com variety, you may also want check to see if .net or .org is available. Other possibilities include .us, .biz, .tv, .info, or .co. These names are not as good for branding purposes, since most people tend to remember them all as .com’s. However, search engines treat all of these varieties equally. The main reason you’ll find better availability for these types of names is that there are far fewer of them in use.

The most important thing to consider when searching for an available domain name is to find names containing your most important keywords so your keywords appear directly in your site’s URL. If using multiple keywords, place the most important keywords first.

Domain names can be registered with up to 63 characters including the ".com" part. With this in mind, a lawyer specializing in family law in Las Vegas might consider registering:

family-law-lawyer-las-vegas.com

or even

family-law-legal-services-las-vegas.com

which happens to be only 39 characters long.

The key, again, is to get a domain name containing your keywords. This is strategically critical, and will probably get more important in the future. By registering all the possible keyword combinations you can think of, you’ll not only have them available to your company when needed, but you've effectively prevented your competition from using them.

Register all possible keyword combinations, making them available to you 
but also effectively preventing your competitin from using them.

One last thing on this topic - if your company name is in your domain name (like mine: geekmanuals.com) that’s fine, but you should also consider all relevant keyword-rich domain names pertaining to your goods or services. This will give you the option of setting up specialized sites that are more visible to the search engines and directories. Think of it as investing in the future, for a later time when you may want to “build” on your domain name.

Registering Domain Names

Once you have come up with some potential domain names, registering them is a simple two-step process.

1. Check their availability.

2. Pay the registration firm to register it.

You can check for available domain names at a variety of locations.

If you search Google for:

“REGISTER DOMAIN NAMES”

you will get a list of sites to both check the availability of names, and to register them.

Registration will typically last 2 years. Prices and services vary, so you will want to shop around for the best deals. You can start with the following registration services:

www.doteasy.com
www.networksolutions.com
www.godaddy.com

Creating Keyword Rich Pages

Let’s now go over some guidelines for designing pages that search engines like and that are more likely to get top ranking in search results.

At this point, it is instructive to remember a popular SEO adage:

“In the beginning, there was the word.”

SEO, above all else, is about only ONE thing - TEXT. Remember, the words on your pages are the ones the search engine MATCHES to queries. The closer the match, the greater the likelihood of that page being relevant to a search query.

However, that being said, first and foremost, all web sites should be designed with the end user in mind, NOT the search engines. The goal is to get users to take some desired action such as purchase a product, sign up for a newsletter, or read a blog post. Just because Yahoo and Google ignore that glossy product shot, that same image could be a critical factor for a visitor to purchase the product pictured in the image. In the end, what it all comes down to is that a user friendly site is a search friendly site.

A user freindly site is a search freindly site.

The list of page design Do’s and Don’ts that I detail in this section of the QuickStart Guide, shouldn’t be taken as gospel, but as guidelines. If you decide to BREAK one or more of these rules, then compensate in another area.

Always use your own design judgment, and what ever you do, always conduct usability tests to ensure that the your pages are at least as pleasing to your human visitors as they are to search engines, if not more so.

So here are the rules:

DESIGN DO's

1. Create keyword-rich pages
Once you have refined your keywords, plan your pages so that each page focuses on just one or two of them. Create Keyword Rich Pages in which a particular keyword phrase is repeated a number of times so that the frequency of that phrase is higher than for any other words or phrases

High-quality, keyword-rich, written content is the single-most fundamental element of successful SEO. Good copy is ALSO important to your human users, so this is win-win. Get your copy correct and you win with good SE placement. Get it right and your visitors ALSO win with clear, accessible, usable content

2. Locate keywords in prominent locations on your site. 
Always locate keywords at the top of the page, in the title, in the meta-tag page description and so on. A keyword located at the TOP of the page is more prominent than a location further down. Likewise, a word at the FRONT of the title tag is more prominent than the words at the end. Place your primary keywords in the TITLE tag of the page, preferably as the FIRST word. As mentioned previously, title tags are a very important component of a Web page.

3. Use Meta-tags
Meta-tags are special HTML tags used to carry information that can be read by browsers (and search spiders too) but that are not displayed in the browser.

Although meta-tags are no longer used to determine a page’s ranking, the meta-description tag is still used by many search systems as the SUMMARY for a page when it’s listed in the search results. The bottom line is, search engines don’t use meta-descriptions, but real live potential customers do. It’s what tells them whether your site is relevant to their search. Think of meta-tag descriptions as short advertisements for your site. If written well, it will entice the searcher to click your link and visit your site.

If you omit the meta description tag, the search engine will likely construct a description for your site based from text randomly grabbed from somewhere on your page. Have a look at this search results. I am pretty sure this company did not intend for ???? to be used as their site description, but that’s what they got because they failed to use a meta description tag on this page.

Another reason the description meta tag is important is that Google and other search systems do INDEX the description. So the rule here is that for every page on your site, include a relevant, descriptive, and enticing meta-tag description.

4. Meta KEYWORD Tags
In general, the only other meta-tag relevant to SEO is the meta-keywords tag. Although more important in the early days of Internet search, meta-keyword tags are NOT as important these days. Although still useful, you need to be cautious in their use. Some search systems, including Google, ignore meta-tag keywords, because they have been abused in the past while others, reportedly Inktomi used by the Yahoo search system, do still use them.

5. Tag Media Files
By now you know that search engines only index plain TEXT- Images, videos, MP3 audio and Flash animations are all pretty much invisible to a search engine. A fundamental component of SEO work is to make these files work for you by giving your media files clear, descriptive names the search engines CAN see. Make sure the folders these files reside in are open and ACCESIBLE. For example, don’t link to them solely through a via JavaScript menu.

Add descriptive text to the ALT attribute in the file’s tag. Make it short and too the point with keywords. Lastly, add text Captions adjacent to the media to help the search engine “understand” what the file is about.

6. Use Breadcrumb Navigation
Breadcrumbs are just hyper links that help users and search engines alike FIND pages. Keyword-rich breadcrumb navigation at the top or side of a page help users understand WHERE they are in your site and provide a nice roadmap for spiders.

7. Link Internally 
Create as many links as possible to other pages containing the same keywords. If possible, link to other pages which have the keyword in the file name. Also, use you keywords in the linking text connecting to the other pages.

DESIGN DON'TS

Avoid Splash Pages
Splash pages tend to be graphic-heavy and text light- Even worse, they only link to ONE page, wrongly implying that it is the only page of importance on your site.

Avoid Flash Pages 
Flash sites give spiders trouble. They often consist of a single web page, and there is no way a one page site can index multiple keywords.

Avoid JavaScript Menus
Instead use search friendly CSS-based drop-down menus. If you must include JavaScript menus, always include a secondary, text-based navigation because JavaScript links are not navigable by spiders.

Avoid Duplicate Content
Never have identical text content appear on multiple domains or within multiple pages.

Avoid Dynamic URL’s
URLs crated by Site Management Systems or middleware such as PHP and ASP, create URLs that constantly change rather than remain static. These dynamic URLS also give search engines trouble. They are hard for the Spiders to follow and can create duplicate content. Learn the various tricks and hacks for converting dynamic URLs into more search engine friendly STATIC URLs.

Avoid Frames and Inline Frames
These are yet more types of pages that are difficult for search engines to spider because they separate pages into 3 or 4 files, rather than just one.

Conclusion

So there you have a basic review of the essential SEO tools and techniques that all web designers should know. This is just an introduction, if you want to learn more, or need to optimize for more competitive key phrases, purchase some SEO trainings or courses.