Archive for July, 2008

• Article PR’s List of Article Submission Sites & Article Distribution Lists
• Online SEO Tools - The Ultimate Collection | From Search Engine Journal
• 21 Ways to Make Your Blog or Website Sticky | From ProBlogger
• Top Directory List by Inbound Link Quality | By SEO Company
• FastPitch.com - Networking/Marketing Service
• The Ultimate RSS Toolset 100+ Resources | From OEdb
• Twitter Backlink Tip | From David Naylor
• Best SEO Firefox Extensions & Tools | From Search Engine People
• Trifecta - SEOMoz’s New Analysis Tool | From SEOMOZ

Enjoy…

Quickly becoming one of my favorite blogs on local SEO, Local SEO Guide just published a cool graph that shows Comscore data on which local search search sites are used the most.

In the classes I teach, this is a topic that comes up quite frequently. A company will already have a website that does pretty well in the search engines and is generating business. But the company gets an idea in their head (I’m not sure from where) that more domain names will equal more business.

There are some problems with this mentality…

1. New Domain Names = More Time & Money to Develop

Just because you have a new domain name, doesn’t mean you automatically have a website. This is obvious, but you’d be surprised at how many people simply don’t understand this. You are going to have to put something on that new domain name and that is going to take time and money. Why do this when you already have a perfectly good website?

Some people buy domains only to have them redirected to the original website. What is the point of this? Why would you market a new domain name only to have it point back to a different site? Branding comes into play with domain names like I talk about in reason 4. Just because you have more domain names doesn’t mean you’re going to get more traffic to the original site.

2. Multiple Domain Names Waters Down Your Search Engine Ranking Effectiveness

This is an important point. Assuming you purchase multiple domains with the plan of marketing them individually… this is really going to water down your potential to build incoming links. As you may or may not know, the number of incoming links to a domain is one of the most important factors in search engine ranking. When you set up multiple domain names, and market them separately, those links are being spread too thin. All that hard work you spent building 1,000 links spread over 10 different domain names should have been focused on building 1,000 for 1 domain name giving that one domain maximum effectiveness in the search engines.

3. Multiple Domain Names Water Down Your Brand

Unfortunately, many people don’t understand the fact that a domain name is a branding tool. Most businesses will use their company name in a domain name by default. Which is good, unless you’re one of those companies that are just looking for a one time sale, branding is very important online.

Branding a domain name properly online is key to return traffic. If people don’t remember your domain name, they probably won’t be visiting your site. And even if they try to find you in the search engines, they will become confused at all your different domains (see reason 4).

They want to type in a search phrase in Google, and find the same domain name at the top (yours) every time. It creates customer loyalty, it gives your customers peace of mind, and your customers will be alot more likely to remember it next time.

4. Creating Multiple Domains is a Surefire way to Confuse Your Customers

Coupled with the idea of branding a domain name online…

You want to give your customers peace of mind. It can truly become confusing for a customer when they can’t figure out which domain name is yours. This is especially true on the search engines when a customer is trying to find your company on the search engines, but instead of finding your main website, they see instead all these other domain name variations. It can quickly become very confusing for a customer. With all the websites out there, customers want consistency, and this plays huge into your branding efforts online.

5. Novelty Domain Names Don’t Work

We’ve all seen this… Mountain Dew will have some new promotion or contest and will create a novelty domain like: www.DewMocracy.com This comes from an old-school ad mentality, that assumes a brand can be built around a catch phrase. In reality, this has only worked a handful of times. It’s not necessarily a bad thing when it comes to offline marketing to build a slogan for brand awareness, but when you move into the online world, there is very little evidence of it working. Every single time I’ve gone to one of these novelty domains, I find that they get little to no traffic, and all they do is confuse the customer in a huge way, and spread incoming links too thin. A much better strategy would be to tie that new promotion into a directory of the primary domain, like this: www.mountaindew.com/dewmocracy That way, any incoming links that the catch phrase or promotion generates will still go towards building the overall authority of the main domain name. I cringe whenever I see novelty domain names being used, they are such a waste and rarely produce results.

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Anyways… if you’re trying to come up with unique online marketing ideas, multiple domain names is not the way to go. Give us a call and we can give you some ideas that do work.

After a lengthy wait, the new Localism.com has finally arrived…

After some of the launch day bugs were worked out late last night, the site seems to be running pretty smoothly all things considered.  The new face of Localism (a sister site to Activerain.com), is at first look very impressive.  In the older site, the information was organized in a very sterile manner that simply corresponded directly with blog posts on Activerain.

In my opinion, the most valuable change has to do with aesthetics, but also with the way the blog posts actually render on the location pages.

Each major city, with a population over 40,000 will now have a sponsorship opportunity, that allows one agent to pay for a special picture, location description, and contact information like this sample city:

Sponsorship opportunities will open officially  on July 31st at 12pm.  You can read more about it on Rich’s Activerain blog.

Another significant change is the article review process.  According to Jonathan Washburn (one of Activerain’s founders), each article and picture submited to Localism will now have to pass a human review process.  The quality of posts was really becoming a problem on the old site, and this is a great addition although it will slow down the publishing process.

One obvious feature that is missing in the release are the Localism categories from the earlier version.  I don’t see any section to look at posts about individual listings, or market reports.  This is a very important feature that I hope they implement eventually.  It’s nice to have community information, but it would be such a waste if they threw out all that content.

Great job guys!  I look forward to the evolution of the new site, and hope you listen to the members of Activerain to make adjustments and improvements.  The loyal AR community members are still the number one reason for AR’s success…

We’ve all seen how big reviews can impact a sales decision. Sites like Amazon changed the way we make product purchasing decisions online forever. With big local business search sites like Yelp and Insider Pages picking up speed in the local search world, online business reviews have become a huge part of online marketing for any business.

There have been many articles written that try to debunk the review model, usually citing the large number of fraudulent reviews.  But whatever your view on the effectiveness of local business reviews, the fact of the matter is that reviews are becoming MORE important, not less as time goes on.

We are now seeing many sites giving special algorithmic boosts based upon number and quality of reviews.  Even Google seems to rank sites higher in the local results that have more reviews than others.

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So what does this mean for your local business?  It means that reviews on sites like Yelp and Google, and a host of others will not only help someone make a buying decision, but also help you rank better on many sites.  I’ve seen a simple well devised review campaign launch a local business to the top of the results with a relatively small number of reviews.

Take a look at this map from the Local SEO Guide that shows the number of online reviews for restaurants around the country:

There are alot of great opportunities out there.  One of of the things Searching Solutions does for many local businesses is to work directly with managers and business owners to come up with creative ways to increase the number of reviews a business receives.

If your local ranking is suffering in the search engines, call us!  We can help…

Searching Solutions

Justin | 720.670.0742

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