However, I have found something almost as good: Your Domain Name.  Having the right domain name can really give you a head start in rankings.  The right domain is a keyword rich domain, or hopefully, your main keyword phrase.

Let’s look at an example from some of the research I have been doing with my new company Anthro.  One of the products that Anthro pushes is radiology furniture (and I really have no idea what that actually is).  Their main competitor AFC Industries bought the domain radiologyfurniture.com.   If you search for that keyword phrase in Google, their website shows up in the first position.  If you look at backlinks, radiologyfurniture.com has a total of 9 backlinks while the competitors have much much more, but aren’t ranking as well.

Another example is my new venture watchfilipinomovies.com.  My main keyword phrase is “Watch Filipino Movies.”  As of this morning, I am ranked on the first page only after having the site active for a few weeks and doing almost no link building.

Obviously a domain without incorporating other SEO fundamentals won’t help you much in the long run, but a solid keyword rich domain as well as great title tags, and great content, and supporting links is a recipe for success.  The power of a good domain is strong enough that for someone starting a new website should definitely do SEO keyword research and pick the right domain even before worry about site content.

For well established websites, I wouldn’t necessarily recommend changing out the domain with a new one (although it can be done successful if you read my earlier post on Successfully moving Your Website).  Also a lot of well established sites have a lot of brand recognition and identity.  We definitely don’t want to lose that with a new domain.  What I would suggest was shown in my first example of domain ranking success.  That is, building a separate site all about that specific keyword that can help give supplemental information that will support your main website.  This could be a new domain (and website) for each site product line, or maybe a new site for a best selling product.

The point of this is to make sure to take your domain into account when you are going to start an SEO project.  I have yet to really test variations of keyword phrases for a domain, but I will definitely update you when I do.

Why Does Your Business Need SEO?

According to the Nielson Company, a total of 9.18 billion searches were executed in February 2010 in the United States alone.  A lot of people are now using search engines to find what they need, whether it is goods, services, or just information.  Every business should be looking to capture a portion of this market, and in order to do that, they must have their website listing show up when someone searches a relevant phrase.

The chart below shows the breakdown of which search engines are being used on a percentage basis:

As the chart shows, Google has the largest share of the market, while Google, Yahoo, and Bing have over 91% together.  This information shows that if your company can control the search engine rankings on Google, most likely your company will control the rest of the search engine market.

Going forward, I am going to be giving you tips and tricks to make your website become as search engine friendly as possible.  Some of the things we will do will help the search engines find your site easier.  Other techniques will make sure all the pages of your website are being found and inside the search engine index.  After that, we will focus on rankings and showing the search engines that your site deserves to be at the top.

What happens when you decide that you need a new domain for your website?  Perhaps your website has been penalized (shame shame).  Or, perhaps you realized that your domain could be better if it had a few more keywords.  Whatever the reason, if you decide to just scrap your current domain and start another, you need to do it right or you will shoot yourself in the foot for SEO.  The reason for this is because the search engines have all of your pages indexed with a certain domain name.  Not only that, but all of the links to your site are (you guessed it) using your domain.  You don’t have to start over however.  There is a way to move your entire site without skipping a beat.

The way to do this is with 301 Redirects.  A 301 Redirect is a protocol used to tell the browser (and search engine spiders) that your site has been permanently moved to a new location.  This protocol is set in your .htaccess file.

For those who don’t know, the .htaccess file basically controls everything that happens with your server.  Before loading your website, the browser will look at the .htaccess file first to determine if it needs to do anything special – like redirecting your website.  301 Redirect aren’t the only functions of the .htaccess file.  For a full tutorial, view this .htaccess tutorial.

The code I am going to give you below needs to be inserted into the .htaccess file, which is usually in the root of your website files.  If you don’t have one, you can easily create one by using your favorite HTML editor (my favorite is Notepad++).

Moving Your Entire Website from One Domain to Another

Copy the following code into your .htaccess file and change the domains.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain\.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]

What this code does is redirects both instances of your old domain (from www and non-www) to the new domain.  Once this code is uploaded to your server, your site will be moved in its entirety.  For example, if you have www.olddomain.com/FAQs, it will redirect to www.newdomain.com/FAQs.

How to Redirect Individual Pages from One Site to Another

Sometimes you don’t need to just redirect the entire site, but individual pages.  I recently did this for a client who had built their website originally with really poor not SEO friendly URLs.  Their new site (because of me) had great keyword rich URLs.  If this is your situation, you will need to redirect your pages individually, however there also is a function to redirect entire folders to a single page.

Here is how to do this in your .htaccess file.

Start by turning your Rewrite Engine on with this code

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on

In order to move a single page, use the following:

redirect 301 /oldunfriendlyurl.html http://www.newdomain.com/very-friendly-url/

You will need to do this for each page.  However, if you don’t have a want to redirect an entire folder to a specific page, use this code:

redirectMatch 301 /oldfolder/ http://www.newdomain.com/newfolder/

With this code, any URL inside of /oldfolder will automatically be redirected.

Changing Your Domain with Google

Finally, you need to tell Google that your old domain is no longer in use and you want your search results to load your new domain.  Luckily for us, Google Webmaster Tools has a built in feature to do this for us.

1. Create a Google Account and visit http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools.
2. You need to verify both domain names with Google Webmaster Tools (this will be easier if you don’t setup the 301 redirects yet).
3. Open up the Webmaster Tools for the old domain.  Click on Site Configuration and then on Change of Address.  From here, you will be able to select from a drop down list your new domain name in order to initiate the change.

This process might take a few days, but once it is complete, Google will now have your site pulling the the correct results and showing your domain name.

According to Google’s Webmaster Blog

Google doesn’t use the “keywords” meta tag in our web search ranking.

Google employee and general SEO spokesman Matt Cutts released the following video:

According to Matt Cutts, Google (and most other search engines) did use META Keywords several years ago as a factor in search engine rankings.  However, SEO Spammers realized this and would spam the META keywords with unrelated keywords or even competitors keywords in order to manipulate their rankings.  This has been done away with.  Those of us out there looking to rank for specific keywords will have to use legitimate methods.

Does this mean that the META keyword tag is completely worthless?  No.  I actually happen to use it a little.  Many ranking report programs will automatically pull META keywords from the website and use those to check for rankings.  I will add my keywords for just this purpose, even though they have nothing to do with rankings themselves.

Image pulled from http://www.dynamixwebdesign.com

Anyways, I ended up combining my mom’s economy hosting account with my hosting account into a more expensive deluxe hosting account in which we can have as many sites as we want.  This will come in handy for this site, Sweet Dreams Online, Captured Memories Photography, and many more future projects I have coming up.  I am now redesigning both of those pages with my every increasing programming skills, SEO abilities, and the power of the almighty wordpress.

Even without constant updates, we are still ranked #3 on Google for “Jeff Ashby,” behind the NASA and Wikipedia pages about the astronaut with the same name.  Jeff Ashby the astronaut has been my online “white whale” ever since I was searching my name with Netscape back in the mid 1990′s.  With a little more work, I’m sure we can beat him.