Work At Home

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:

The Secrets of SEO Revealed

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.

Terry Didcott
Work at Home

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