How Important is Your URL to Your Site Rankings?

October 11, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Google, Online Marketing, seo, Web Sites 

Your URL, also known as your website address plays a pretty big part in your search engine rankings.  What you’ll learn here today is what that part is and how it might be affecting your own websites.

Let’s start with keywords.  Since the very beginning of SEO time, keywords have always and still do play a very large part in where your website and its web pages get ranked within major search engines.

While the methods have changed drastically over the years, without keywords; the search engines wouldn’t have the faintest idea what to do with your content.  These keywords, no matter how they’ve been used over the years have remained a constant in helping the search engines determine where your web pages should be ranked.

Let’s look at a typical URL structure and how keywords play a role in your sites ranking.

Here’s a typical URL:  http://www.Site.com/subdirectory/filename.html

It hasn’t been a very well-kept secret that keywords in your domain name and in your sub-directories’ names tend to help where your site gets ranked in the search engines.  Depending upon how much significance the search engines’ algorithms place on keywords in these locations will determine where the site should be that day but even with that said, it still seems to be a pretty significant factor in rankings.

As an example, if you do a search for any term that would be considered highly competitive, you’ll likely see results on the first page of URL’s that have that competitive term contained within them.

“Internet Marketing” is a great example.  On this first page you’ll see results where the URL’s contain that exact term either in their domain name or within a sub-domain such as http://internetmarketing.school.com.

Now, there’s a bit of a caveat when it comes to sub-domains because the search engines treat sub-domains differently than they do TLD’s or top level domains (those URL’s that end in .com, .org, .net, .edu, etc.).

Sub Domains

Sub-DOMAINS are treated by the search engines as a completely new website.  For instance, if you owned http://www.school.com – this is your main TLD or top-level domain.  If you created a sub-domain such as http://internetmarketing.school.com this, at least in the eyes of a search engine, is a brand-spanking new website.   This further means that if you want to take advantage of the traffic and reputation that school.com already has, it will be much more difficult to do so.

Instead, it would be more advantageous to you to create a sub-directory instead of a sub-domain.

Sub Directories

If it’s not at all possible to find a domain name that contains the keyword you want to use then your next best option is to create a sub-directory that does contain that keyword.  An example would be http://school.com/internetmarketing.  This sub-directory is NOT treated as a separate domain and thus has a better chance of ranking well.

Your Domain Name

Your domain name, URL, website address or whatever it is you wish to call it, is your main website address.  Using the above example, this would be http://www.school.com.

It’s no secret that keywords contained in a main URL or top-level domain do get a bit of a rankings boost when it comes to the search engines.  But you need to be careful here.  It used to be that if you registered a domain name such as:

http://keyword-keyword-keyword.com that you’d get a rankings boost.  This is no longer true.

Search engines like Google count not only the number of characters in a domain name but also take into account the dashes in a domain name.  When in doubt, do NOT use dashes and instead try to come up with a domain name that contains your keyword such as http://internetmarketingschool.com

File Names

What you name your files is also an important factor.  Let’s say that you wanted to focus a page on local internet marketing within the internet marketing sub-directory.  In this case, you’d use http://school.com/internetmarketing/local-internet-marketing.html.

What you DO want to avoid is something spammy such as http://school.com/internet-marketing/local-online-internet-marketing-for-businesses-all-totally-free.html

Whenever someone comes across this in a search engine results page, they’re likely going to avoid it like the plague simply because it just looks spammy; whether or not this was your intention.

Keep the file name short and to the point.

So all in all, here’s what you’ve learned:

  • If you can use a keyword in your TLD without creating a tremendously long URL, it is advantageous to do so.
  • If you can’t find that perfect domain, instead use that keyword in a sub-directory.
  • Sub-domains are treated like brand new websites.
  • Name your files accurately but keep them short and to the point.
Until next time!  Have a fantastic day!

 

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8 Ways to Grow Your Facebook Page

August 22, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Facebook, Online Marketing, Plugins 

Nearly everyone on the planet has heard about Facebook and smart businesses; whether that be online or off are using Facebook as a way to connect with their customers on a more personal basis.

But just creating a Facebook Page for your business is not enough.  You also need to get people to “like” your page; which can take time.  Here are ______ Ways to Grow Your Facebook page.

  1. Create your Facebook page.
  2. Add Facebook plugins to your website or blog.  Most of your visitors are probably finding you through your website so make it easy for them to “like” your Facebook page too by using the special plugins that Facebook provides.
  3. Invite people that you already know to like your page.  These can be people on Facebook or even people whom you connect with via email.
  4. When you do send out emails either in the form of a newsletter or just a simple update, include that link to your Facebook page.
  5. Do you have a Twitter account?  Let your users know that you have a Facebook page as well by adding the link to your profile on Twitter and even updating your posts on Twitter every so often to remind them.
  6. Just getting people to your page isn’t enough.  They need to see that you are engaged there, talking ( and mentioning ) others, and giving updates on information that you believe they would find helpful.  Quality content and interacting with those on your page are key.
  7. When you do post something on your page, ask those who read it to share with others.
  8. Consider running a contest or a giveaway on your Facebook page to encourage more people to like or share your page.  Here are some ideas you can use to do just that.
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Yahoo’s Site Explorer Going Away … Soon

August 21, 2011 by · Leave a Comment
Filed under: Affiliate Marketing, Internet Marketing, Local Online Marketing, Marketing, Niche Marketing, Online Marketing, Ranking, seo 

Back in July of 2011, Yahoo! announced that they’re going to be shutting down their popular Site Explorer tool used in the past by many website owners to help determine the link popularity of their competitors.

This is largely due to transitioning to the Microsoft search platform.

Once the transition is complete for all markets (it currently is complete for the US, Canada, Australia, Brazil and Mexico), they’ll shut down the Site Explorer Tool.

The Site Explorer API has fed many websites data for years so it will be interesting to see how it pans out for many of them.  That said however, there are multiple “independent” sites out there (independent meaning not search-engine related), that will get this same kind of information for you and Majestic SEO is one of those companies.

Majestic SEO has their own “Majestic Site Explorer” something that they’ve worked on for years and now that Site Explorer is heading into the technology graveyard, you can bet that many people will be transitioning themselves to the Majestic tool.

 

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