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Your Domain Name

Although a domain name is not free - well, almost at $9.99 or so a year, it’s what you do with that domain that can help you in your search engine listings.

Although the jury is still out with a definitive answer as to whether or not your keyword or phrase in your domain makes a difference in your search engine rankings, I suggest that if you can use it, do.

You’ll want to get your keyword as close to the front of your domain as possible. Here’s an example. Let’s say our market is “lamps”. There’s probably no way whatsoever that you’ll be able to get the domain name “lamps.com” but, you could use different variations while still keeping that term in the forefront.

Consider variations like “lampsforsale.com” or “lampsforthehome.com” or even “lampsthatinspire”.

Choose something that is easy to remember and has a cadence to it. Something like “lampslightlife.com” or “lampslicketysplit.com”.

I want you to notice something here. First of all, all of the domains I suggested are all .com domains. Although you’ll hear varying suggestions on the use of .net and .org domain names, I highly suggest that you purchase a .com domain since nearly everyone will, by default, enter your website and then “.com”.

Ideally, purchase all three versions of your domain; the .com, .net and .org versions as well.

Another thing I want you to notice is that I did NOT hyphenate the domains. There are plenty of arguments online that say it doesn’t matter if you have a hyphenated domain name or not since you’ll be found in the search engines anyway. I completely disagree.

There will be times, especially when people get to know your website name pretty darn well and they’re not going to be heading to the search engines to find you. They’ll just type in your domain name to get to where you are. If you use hyphens in your name, you are guaranteed that someone, somewhere will screw up and put in your domain name without the hyphens thus ending up at your competitions website.

Just consider these two alternatives:
LampsLightLife.com OR Lamps-Light-Life.com. Which one would YOU as a site visitor remember to type in, especially if you’re busy?

Better be safe than sorry and stick with a domain without hyphens.

And while we’re on the subject of domain names, I suggest GoDaddy
for that registration…if you want to take it further and talk about hosting (because you need somewhere to put your website) I suggest HostGator by far.

So remember, GoDaddy
for the domain registration and HostGator for the web hosting.

Search engine optimization is one of the best ways you can use to get your website ranked highly in the search engines. To get the most out of your efforts, you need a well optimized site that will bring in lots of visitors for you but if you’ve ever taken the time to check out the prices of some of the larger SEO firms, the costs can range in the thousands of dollars.

Thankfully you can get information about how to optimize your website yourself from many places on the Internet, one of them right here at SlingBrain.com. Here’s a few that can get you started right away. (For free I might add).

1. Exchanging Links. While this used to be a big favorite amongst a lot of online marketers, it’s not as important as it used to be thanks to some well-known search engines penalizing sites that went over the top with this technique. That being said, there are still benefits to exchanging links with other websites in order to help your page ranking. You just need to follow a few guidelines first.

First, be sure that the website you want to exchange links with hasn’t been barred by the search engines. You’d be surprised how many people overlook this simple but very important step. You can do this by heading over to Google and in the address bar entering site:www.thesiteyourconsidering.com. If nothing shows up, they’ve been blacklisted so don’t even think of trading links with them. You’ll go downhill faster than a snowball on ice.

Second, be sure that the website you’re exchanging links with is on a related topic as yours. You don’t want to trade links with a site about Pizza if your site is about flowers.

Third, keep the link trading at a minimum. Be sure you’ve got some natural incoming links as well that aren’t requiring a link back to you. You need to keep the two balanced out.

Fourth, be sure that the page you want to link to has a PageRank. Obviously the higher the better, but any kind of PageRank means that they’ve been around for some time; at least long enough for Google to know that they’re online.

Fifth, don’t be shy. Find out who is listed in the top 10 of Google or Yahoo and simply ask if they’d be willing to exchange links with you. I don’t recommend you doing this until you’ve had your site up for quite some time, and have plenty of good, relevant content on it. You don’t want to be spamming these sites either. Send a simple and polite request to the webmaster, if they don’t respond in a week or so, then wait and do it again in another month.

An easy way to get your website indexed quicker (that is, faster than sitting around and waiting for a bot to find you), is to have someone who is already indexed link to you.For example, let’s say that you’ve just finished your brand new website and you’re anxious to get it indexed in the search engines.

One way to do that - that I don’t recommend - is to submit your website to the search engines. This is an outdated technique and one that will take weeks if not months to come to fruition.

The second, more preferred method, is to have someone who is already indexed in a search engine (preferably Google), place a link on one of their indexed pages to your brand new site.

This way, when the Googlebot pays a visit to this already-indexed website and finds your link, it will follow that link to your brand new website and index the pages it finds there.

Here are a few additional tips that you might find helpful:

• When finding someone who is already indexed, try and get a link from a website whose content is relevant to yours. In otherwords, if you’re selling wedding dresses, see if you can find a wedding invitation website to link to you.
• Additionally, use anchor text that is relevant to your website. Anchor text is the “clickable” portion of the link. So for your wedding dresses website, you’d want the anchor text to be something like “wedding dresses” or “wedding gowns”.
• Be certain that all of your webpages you want placed in the search engines index can be found by the search engines. Ideally, make sure you have a site map on your website that contains links to all the other pages on your site, and that you link every page on your site to that site map.

These few tips should get your brand new site indexed in no time. As for what page they end up on once their indexed, is another story. Make sure you read the other tips contained on this site to help get you noticed.