A lot of people buy domains with dashes and some people swear they won’t touch a domain with dashes in it.  Are domains with dashes any good?  Do they hurt SEO?

The search engines do rank sites with dashes, but you might end up in the google sandbox for a bit because a lot of spammers, scammers, and just all about shady characters use domains with dashes because the regular one isn’t available or they can make it look like they are the normal domain to steal their traffic.

The keywords are viewed by the search engines and you can definitely be ranked for your keywords using domains with dashes and they are definitely a good alternative if you can’t find a decent domain extension with your keywords or decent domain alternative.

Personally I rarely buy domains with dashes because I like people to remember my site.  People forget to add dashes and end up on other sites.  I want them to get to my site the easiest way possible.  Dashes make a domain name harder to remember and you have to be careful when using them.

I have bought dashed domains and used them to quickly get ranked for my chosen keywords but I don’t like them and try to avoid them as much as possible.

Here’s a little secret your own competitors might use against you and even if they aren’t there’s no reason why you can’t do it against them.

Basically you are opening up your competitor’s source code and using it to help you.

I use FireFox so the instructions are open up FireFox go to View, then Page Source.

For Internet Explorer it’s View, then Source.

The reason we’re opening up their source code is because there are important factors for each page for example the title, description and somewhat the metatags.

Since most of the content you can view on the page;  these are the three things you should be focusing on.  Personally I like looking at metatags and harvesting keywords off of them.  Of course viewing the title and description will also help you form ideas for your own.

The major search engines don’t put a big focus or even any focus on the metatags, but sites that are ranking usually use some or most of the keywords in these tags.  If you copy them and include them in your current SEO strategy it will help you rank for more keywords and for their keywords.

Sorry for the long delay in between posts.  I’ve been insanely busy lately, which of course means business is booming.  Which brings me to the point of this post.  How can you make your business boom?

It’s easy look for clients in places you don’t normally look and of course SEO (search engine optimization) helps out a ton.

Business wasn’t exactly slow a few months ago, but I decided to try different tactics in my spare time to drum up added business.  I’m a workaholic so working 16 hours a day doesn’t bother me (as long as it’s not manual labor), but I can’t work 16 hours a day because I do have a family.  The first step I took was figure out a way to turn every day into a 16 hour day without doing 16 hours a day of work.

So I looked around and found tons of unpoached leads and generated several of my own leads (through SEO), a long story short I got myself up to 16 hour days by getting new clients, but my family was almost being neglected, so I decided to have two of me.  In the last month or two, I’ve hired three people.  Two of them I let go because their performance wasn’t up to par with the way I work.  I’m left with one (who’s doing an excellent job), but it’s really making me much more efficient and now there’s more working hours available in the day.  I’ll probably hire someone else because I think having two people help me would be even better and I probably do need two people because I’m creeping back up to those 16 hour work days (and have had several in the last week).

The point of that whole statement was I found leads in unlikely sources, I converted the leads, I hired more help which motivates me to generate even more business (because now more can get accomplished), and I’m going to expand again in the near future because I don’t want to start a waiting list and lose out on customers.  Don’t stop trying to generate leads.  The minute you stop new clients might stop showing up.  Word of mouth can get you tons of clients, but even that can be tapped depending on your business.

I know you’re probably waiting for the unlikely lead source.  Sorry that’s not included here (or for sale).  Look back on some of my posts and you’ll find several ways of creating leads, that work.

SEO won’t let you down no matter how you look at it, SEO being your first form of attack will get you noticed no matter what business it is you do.  There are so many people searching online that the yellow pages…dare I say…is just about obsolete.  I read recently that some companies are planning on doing away with local yellow pages unless you request them.  Online is the place to be.  If you don’t have a website you better get one designed and created now.  I don’t care if you’re a carpenter in Howell or a dentist in Toms River get yourself online now.

Sometimes you need to work harder and then smarter.

Did you know that your site’s navigation can also play a role in search engine optimization for your site?  The search engines look for keywords and keyword rich URLs are given added weight in your rankings.

You sell wicker lawn chairs and your page navigation looks like this:

Home

Products

Etc….

Where it says Home you can rename it to Wicker Lawn Chairs Home Page.  Where it says Products a way to get a little more bang for your search engine buck, would be to rename it to Wicker Lawn Chair Products.   Of course this is a simplified example and you should do it to all or most of your URLs as you see appropriate.

The navigation text we are adding is technically called anchor text.  You want your anchor text to have the keywords you’re trying to rank for.  This helps the search engines figure out what’s on your pages, which in turn boosts your rankings a bit.  Anchor text is not only important with on site SEO, but it is also important for off site SEO.

Article writing is an easy way to get targeted traffic to your site.  The only bad thing is you actually have to write the articles or pay someone to do it for you.  There are several article sites with high page rank that will let you submit your article and add your link in the resource box.  With articles you are building authority and looked at as an expert in your topic and you are doing off page optimization (it’s even more powerful if you add anchor text to your hyperlinks).  Another good thing is you can sell your articles if you’re a prolific writer for quick cash.

Article marketing will get your website ranked quickly for a lot of keywords, for the price of an article.  You don’t only have to stick to article directories you can also use social networking sites and build web pages (on sites like blogger, squidoo, wordpress, etc…) based off of your articles and include anchor text links back to your site.  These are authority sites and give you that needed boost to get your sites ranking.

You can use the same article over and over again, but the best way to rank for many keywords is keeping each article unique.  It will maximize the amount of keywords you’ll rank for.

You can also use article marketing if you’re an affiliate for products and link them right to your cloaked affiliate link.  People actually do buy from reading a good article and a related affiliate product with a decent sales page.

A fast way of creating articles for those out there that aren’t good at typing or talk better than they write is using a speech to text converting program.  With a program that does this your article can be written as fast as you talk.  Arguably the best program out there for this is Dragon Naturally Speaking.  You train it to recognize your voice and words and the results get more accurate the more you use it.   Usually a few edits and fixing punctuation and you’re done.

Article marketing is really a way of reiterating that content is king on the internet.  Good content will get you ranked for a lot of the terms you desire.

Local directories and map listings are a great place to have your business listed.  A lot of these sites feed other sites data so you can get traffic from literally hundreds of large sites for submitting to just a few.

I’ve compiled a list of sites that will let you add your business listing for free.  Most of these are major sites with big pull and tons of traffic.

citysquares.com
ibegin.com
infousa.com
insiderpages.com
judysbook.com
littleengine.com
local.com
local.google.com
local.yahoo.com
magicyellow.com
maps.live.com
mojopages.com
superpages.com
truelocal.com
tupalo.com
yellowbot.com
yellowpages.com
yelp.com

This list is good and active as of the time of this posting.

A lot of businesses don’t realize if they don’t grab their business someone else can and might.  Local listing hijacking is real.  You’ll notice if your business is listed in any of these directories you can claim your business if you didn’t previously.  What happens if someone else claims your listing?  That’s right they can change your business address, website address, phone number, etc…  Than they get all of your hard earned traffic.

Don’t hesitate grab your local listing at least from the top 3 search engines and if you have time gradually grab your listing from the other major companies (infousa, superpages, etc…).  Your business will be glad you did.

In the real estate business it’s called OPM (other peoples money), in the online world it’s called leeching.  What I’m about to tell you is about leveraging other peoples work and getting that important link back to you.

An easy way of doing this is going to free template or theme sites and downloading as many themes as you can get your hands on.  Make sure you read the licenses and terms included…now that gets my disclosure out of the way.  Most templates or themes require a link back to the original designer.  What’s not included in most of those terms is that you can’t add your own links or content to those pages or distribute them yourself.

Now we open up all of the themes and templates and add our beautiful hyperlink with anchor text.  If we really want to get crazy we can slap one of our advertisements right on the template.  Now we go to all of the free template sites we can think of that accepts submissions and add our templates to the site and we can also create our own.  Don’t forget the warez sites and forums.  A lot of people hate warez sites but these things can spread anything like crazy even legitimate products and items (as long as you are distributing them for free).

Now everytime someone installs one of your altered templates/themes you get a link back as long as they don’t erase your links.  If you put up ads you’ll get traffic through your ads also.  Be careful do not use Adsense or a similar program with your templates because you have no control over the content of the sites and you don’t want to get banned for having your ads on a porn or illegal warez site or for fraudulent clicks.

This technique doesn’t only work for themes and templates.  It works for scripts, ebooks, programs, videos, and just about anything online that you are given rights to manipulate.

Warning: You might piss a lot of people off doing this.

This is what I call By Any Means Necessary SEO.

There are a million search engine optimization gurus out there and they all teach different things.  Everyone tells you to worry about title tags, H1 tags, etc…  What no one is telling you is that if you do everything in one whack you might not get the full SEO potential.

I did an experiment with a couple of sites.  One was fully optimized, the other was partially optimized.  Both were on the same topic and the domain names were identical (except for the extension).  They were hosted on different servers in different datacenters with completely different IP addresses.  I submitted both of them to the same exact sites, did the same exact off site SEO for both of them.  A funny thing happened.  They both ranked about the same in the initial rankings with the more optimized site 2 places up.  Then once a week I started to optimize site 2 (the site that wasn’t optimized) with little changes like adding tags to images, adding more keywords, adding a title instead of a generic index title, etc…Over the course of about 2 months site 2 jumped up in the rankings about 17 places and site 1 jumped 5 places in the results for the same keywords.

A little note, these were static sites so there was no actual content changes during this time except for the small changes made to site 2.  Also these results were on Google.

Since these were static sites, it looks like google was counting all the small optimization changes as new/fresh content, which in turn drove up the rankings.

It’s not always good to get everything done in one shot.  The search engine spiders are smart and can tell when you make small changes to your site and in turn will reward you.

Of course it’s up to you how you do it.  If you’re doing it yourself and don’t have to worry about a budget you can go the gradual approach.  If someone else is doing the work and you have to pay for every job completed you might want to get everything done in one shot.