SEO Hosting Blog

(photo from Si1very)

As long time readers of this blog may remember, I made a post called “3 Firefox Extensions that Every SEO Should Have” all the way back in September. While I still personally use all three of these plugins (and think you should too), they’re only the tip of the iceberg in terms of what’s available.

Because just about anyone who is involved in search engine marketing spends the majority of their time online, I thought I would look at some of the best Firefox plugins that are available to help you increase your productivity.

Morning Coffee: When I get to my office every morning, I go through the exact same routine. Some people might think this sounds boring, but keeping a consistent schedule helps to get me on the right track for the day. In addition to knocking out my email as quickly as possible, I also go through a handful of websites.

Because I visit this same set of websites, I can use the Morning Coffee plugin to automatically open all of those websites in tabs with just one click.

FireFTP: This is one of those plugins that I honestly can’t believe is free. FireFTP does exactly what the name implies; it provides a FTP program directly in your browser. You simply select FireFTP from the Tools menu, and it will launch in a new tab. You can store the login information for different FTP accounts and quickly toggle between them. The transfers are fast, and the interface of this plugin is quite easy to navigate.

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As I have discussed multiple times, PPC marketing can play a vital role in your overall search engine marketing strategy.  In addition to learning how to properly create and manage PPC campaigns, the key to successfully converting paid visitors into customers is to increase the conversion rate of your landing page.

If you have a landing page but are unsure of what you can do to increase the conversion rate of your page, I have put together a list of three varied resources that will help you get on the right track.

Google Website Optimizer: Just like Google Analytics, I understand why some people are not comfortable using a tool like Google Website Optimizer.  However, the truth is that this is another valuable tool that Google is providing (for free), and I would be doing all of the readers of this blog a disservice by not discussing it.  So, while I’m not going to try to persuade you to use it, I do want to look at what it is capable of doing.

Google Website Optimizer is a web based tool that allows you to perform A/B split testing on your landing pages.  Whether you want to test different headings, images or content, you can run these tests with Google Website Optimizer, and the tool will track what’s happening and provide you with the results.  All of the features of Google Website Optimizer go back to helping you increase your conversion rate, and since the purpose of a landing page is to convert visitors into some form of a customer, I think this is a very useful free tool for landing page optimization.

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#1: Your Small Business Needs a Website - This may sound obvious to many readers of this blog, but that doesn’t mean that all small business owners are listening to this advice.  As Danny Sullivan noted on Search Engine Land back in the middle of October, he is still quite amazed at the amount of small businesses that don’t have even a basic website.

The bottom line is that more and more people are looking for small businesses online (even my Mom has said that she almost never consults the phone book anymore), so if your business doesn’t have a website, you are literally giving potential clients or customers to your competitors who have taken the time to create a website.

#2: Your Website Needs a Blog - Like #1, this should be obvious, but given the fact that a large percentage of small businesses don’t have websites, an even larger percent don’t have blogs.

As a result of all the Web 2.0 hype that has gone on over the years, the whole perception of blogs has gotten confused and distorted.  All of the buzzwords aside, the simple fact is that a blog is a way to connect with your target audience.  So, figure out what your target demographic wants to read and discuss, and then use your blog to start pushing that content out to them.  If a tailor from Savile Row can use a blog to send his sales of $4000 suits through the roof, your small business can also benefit from starting a blog.  If you need another example to make you motivated, just look at how the traffic for SEO Hosting took off once the blog was relaunched in June.

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If you read many blogs within the Internet marketing industry, you undoubtedly come across posts on a regular basis that discuss how to use analytics programs to track the online conversions associated with your PPC campaigns.  Although most of these posts do a great job of helping people understand not only how to get more out of their analytics programs, but also to run PPC campaigns that are more cost efficient, there is one area that most of these posts overlook.

The topic that I rarely see discussed in PPC blog posts within the Internet marketing industry is how to track offline conversions.  For most businesses, regardless of their size, there is a very good chance that this is an extremely important topic for them to understand.  So, if there are lots of people who are interested in understanding how to track offline PPC conversions, why do more of the posts not address the subject?  From what I have seen, the reason that most bloggers don’t talk about tracking offline PPC conversions is because it doesn’t directly apply to them.  Most of the people blogging about PPC are affiliate marketers, which means that they are only using PPC to generate leads or send traffic to merchants.  Since all of their activity takes place online, that is the only thing that they need to worry about tracking.

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I often get asked this question and I would like to open up a discussion with you regarding domain name selection in relation to search engine ranking. In my experience, I feel that the domain name you choose can strongly influence the keywords you rank for in Google. I know that this isn’t always the case, because there are plenty of popular blogs that have odd names, that rank for keywords that aren’t found in their domain name. 

The difference I see though is with popularity and backlinks pointing back to these more popular sites. For me, I build very low traffic and low key niche sites. Just about every web site that I build has a domain name with the primary keywords in it that I am targeting. Typically it doesn’t take very long to rank for the keyword phrase I am targeting. Within that, I will also rank for many relevant keyword phrases based off the primary keyword phrase due to me writing content that specifically targets these other phrases. 

All in all, I have had and continue to have great success with doing this. With that said, I’ll admit, I have never tried to target keyword phrases using a domain name that didn’t match up with the primary keyword phrase I target. So I can’t say for sure that what I am doing is truly a legitimate tactic or strategy. That is why I wanted to carry on a discussion with you about it. I’d like to know your opinion on how important do you think domain name selection is for search engine ranking? Share your feedback and opinions using the comment form below.