December 2007
Monthly Archive
Work at Home Basic SEO For Your Site or Blog
Following on from the last post entitled: “Work at Home and Web Hosting“, I’d like to take a look at some basic Search Engine Optimization (SEO) that is essential to getting your work at home website or blog into a decent placement in the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) in the future.
It’s all about choosing the right domain name for your website or blog.
That really depends on what your work at home website or blog is about. This is called your niche, or theme or topic and should be reflected in your choice of domain name. By way of an example, let’s assume that your theme is, like this blog, work at home.
I’ll assume you’ve got yourself some professional hosting set up as explained in the previous post, so now you need a domain name that best describes your work at home website or blog. I can already hear you saying “But all the really good domain names have been taken by other people!” and you’d be right. Well, almost.
There are still some options that you can exploit.
First of all, in a domain name you should consider what comes after the dot. By that I mean the .com part of your domain. To be honest, if you want to be taken seriously as a work at home business and make money doing it, don’t bother with any other extension.
Why?
The reason being that when a business domain name is dropped into conversation, it’s ALWAYS assumed that it is a .com domain.
That makes it even harder to find a good, descriptive domain name for your work at home website or blog without having to settle for one a mile long. But there’s more to it than your domain name being descriptive. It must include your main keywords (as in the case of this blog, work at home). Keywords are the search terms that people will type into the Google search box to find websites or blogs like yours. That narrows it down even further!
So why is it important to have your keywords in your domain name?
A Concise Lesson in SEO:
The reason your main keywords should be in your domain name is that the search engines place more emphasis on keyword matching meaning that the more of your keywords on your site that match up, the better potential your site has for a higher placement in the SERPs. This is not the only deciding factor, but it does go some way to influencing it.
So what should match?
Well, the keywords in your domain name should match the main keywords in your site header’s meta tag, your title and your main h1 headings in your header and your body text as well as any anchor tags, alt tags, h2, h3… etc header tags, and bolded text. That’s what the serch engines are looking to find and when they do, they will rank your site higher than one that does not do these things. Simple as that. In your body text, you must also repeat your keywords several times, but don’t overdo it or you’ll be seen to be spamming your own site by what is known as “keyword stuffing”. To achieve an optimum keyword density in your content, you need to between 2% and 5% of your word count to be keywords, with 3% being about optimum.
So how do you find the right domain name?
You have to get creative.
Personally, I’d been racking my brains for a relatively short, descriptive and at the same time keyword based domain name centred around “work at home” for this project. Well, to be honest I couldn’t find anything suitable, so I decided the best way around the problem was to use a subdomain with the keywords in. I’d already set up a Make Money blog/website using this idea but it still had a very long double-barrel name. I wanted to shorten that domain name and then add the work at home subdomain.
As all the usable short top level domains had also been taken, I happened upon the fact that there are still many four character top level domains still available as long as you don’t mind them being meaningless.
For my purposes, that was exactly what I wanted. A nondescript top level domain that I could generate many keyword based subdomain names and none of them would conflict. This blog is the result (and I also have several other websites using the same top level domain) using 01a1.com as a non-descriptive top level domain. That domain does have a basic website homepage, but I don’t actually use it for anything specific (yet).
So with a keyword rich subdomain name, I’ve effectively created the first step for SEO’ing this blog to the best of it’s potential.
By the way, if you are interested in learning some more SEO techniques and to boost your blog or website in the SERPs, I have written an information packed ebook covering ALL the SEO techniques that are available. It is very reasonably priced at $9.97 which actually is an absolute steal in the current high price climate of SEO. You can order your copy from this link:
With that ebook in your armory, you’ll have all the SEO knowledge at your fingertips to optimize your own website or blog to easily compete with the sites at the top of the search engines!
That’s all for now. In future posts, I’ll be looking at further ways to enhance your work at home business so you can make money from it.
Work at Home and Web Hosting
tel 09 Dec 2007 | : work at home
Let’s get stuck into some of the important topics that you’ll stumble over as you get started in your work at home business.
One of the first things you should really consider when deciding upon a work at home business is whether you are going to set up a professionally hosted website and blog(s) or start by going only with free hosted blogs.
Going the free route is the safest by far, as it gives you a taste of what is to come and you can cut your teeth and make all your mistakes with a free blog or three and not do too much damage.
The downside to this approach when you are serious about your work at home project is that you’ll waste a lot of time if you subsequently decide to move up to a professionally hosted blog and a website or two. By wasting time, I mean that you’ll go through all the hard work of setting up your blog, or blogs on your chosen free host (most choose Blogger as it allows you to place ads on your blogs where other’s may not). You’ll create a name for your blogs and do a lot of writing and maybe some design work to make them look aesthetically pleasing and more original.
As time passes, you’ll populate them with a lot of content and start to acquire links from other sites. After a few months, assuming you are still going strong, Google may reward your hard work by awarding your blog(s) with some page rank(PR).
So far so good. Then you decide you want the flexibility of hosting your own website and blogs. Guess what? You’ll have to start at the bottom again. You can’t transfer your blog’s domain name to your new professional host, so you have to buy your own. That means you can’t transfer your Google page rank to your new website or blogs. Neither can you easily transfer the links you’ve acquired to your free blogs, especially if they come from other blogs and website owners that have linked to your because they like your blog and its content, not because you have gone looking for them yourself.
So that is time and effort wasted. I know, I did exactly that for the first couple of months before I was set straight by another more experienced work at home marketer.
So if you’re serious, start as you mean to go on and get some professional hosting from the off. You can still create some free blogs as well as they come in useful in the wider scope of the work at home Internet Marketing arena.
So who do you turn to for professional webhosting?
Well, an established and highly recommended hosting company and the one that this blog is hosted on is HostGator.
For the absolute ton of features that come with the hosting package the cost is minimal.
For your work at home online business, you’ll probably want to create more than one website and blog – this is normal and extends the scope of your work at home business. With HostGator, for the one hosting package and single monthly payment you can host as many websites and blogs as you can shake a stick at! That’s more than you’ll probably ever have time and patience to create, let alone find domain names for.
You can easily create a brace of WordPress blogs, just like this one, using the easy Fantastico feature from their control panel (cPanel).
Don’t get confused between your own self-hosted WordPress blog and the free hosted variety. While you have access to the same templates – and there are plenty of them – you are not restricted by the tight rules they place on their free bloggers, like not being able to place affiliate links or ad banners anywhere on your blog. When you are self-hosted you can put what you like on your blog!
Another important feature of having your own hosted site/blog is that your hosting company will make sure your service stays up. HostGator guarantees 99.9% uptime, whereas free blog hosts couldn’t possibly match that level of guarantee. In fact they have the power to take the service down whenever it pleases them, not when it pleases you!
With your own hosted blog, you can add as much content as you are able, including graphics, large MP3 file even video if you want to. Your disk limit is huge – my own hosting package with HostGator gives me 1,000gb of disk space (that’s one terrabyte!) and I’d struggle to fill that up!
Another consideration is bandwidth. When you use all your up with a free host, they’re not likely to give you any more – so if you fall short then you are shut down for the rest of the month often without warning. I get 1,000gb of bandwidth per month for my up- and down-loads, which again I would find almost impossible to use up!
In fact if I did start to get close to using that level of bandwidth, for one I could congratulate myself on having some very successful sites and for another, I could simply contact HostGator and upgrade my hosting to cover the extra.
Are you starting to like the idea of using HostGator like I am?
Lastly, as I’ve already mentioned, my HostGator package allows me to add as many domains as I want (or can afford to buy). The number is in fact unlimited – domains and subdomains. Combine that with unlimited MySQL databases and I can create as many WordPress blogs as I want as well, although I am probably limited by the amount of time I have to write in them all!
So that’s my take on self hosting over free hosting.
As I said, don’t completely discount free blogs as they do have their uses and one of them is to generate links to your main websites and blogs to help with page rank and also generate some more traffic, without which your work at home business will not survive anyway.
But that’s for a future post.