SEO Experience: Starting a New Business

If you are starting a new business and haven't yet registered a domain name for your future website, here are a few things that you can do to ensure your site is found by visitors:

Purchase a 1-day subscription for WordTracker and do a reality check on the keywords you want to to focus on.

When I source new contracts for my firm, I often visit job boards to see what kind of skills are in demand, and it always surprises me to see that even large companies list among "required skills" things like knowing how to use WordTracker.

WordTracker is a software that literally "tracks" or records the keywords people type when they search via search engines. The tool stores those queries and then displays them to you in various combinations.

• Example: if you are a travel website, you would find that people rarely query 'popular activities' or 'popular attractions' when they use search engines to prepare for travel. Instead, they query 'things to do'. If you type 'popular activities' in WordTracker, the tool will display for you all related keywords that people have actually used in reality and you will see that 'things to do' are used by far more often. So if you are a travel site, you would not want to miss 'things to do'. But you might not necessarily think of this keyword on your own. This is where WordTracker comes very useful.

In my view, checking your prospective keywords via WordTracker is probably the most important thing you should do before you do anything else, before you register your domain name. But! Anyone over 7 can learn how to use WordTracker in less than half an hour. Go to their website, fill out their registration form, provide payment and then type your keywords in question, make selection by clicking a few boxes and then wait to see the results. Be patient, it make take a while for a page to load. After you check the keyword combinations you had in mind, also check (click) all suggested keyword combinations that this tool will have degenerated for you. Be patient and wait for pages to load. Have you been taking notes?

Register a domain name that would contain your most desired keywords.

A message therapist located in Ottawa would want to consider the following name combinations:

• ottawamassagetherapy.com
• massagetherapyottawa.com
• massagetherapydowntownottawa.com
• ottawadowntownmassagetherapy.com

Having your most important keywords as part of your domain name is the best thing you can do for your future SEO. The major drawback is that it is very difficult to find short domain names, so your URL ends up being very long and cumbersome. My advice: never mind this and include your most desired keywords in your URL. A long domain name is a small price to pay for high search engine ranking. If nothing else is available, use hyphen or dots to separate individual words, but remember that search engines are able to distinguish individual words even if they are joined together in a long string.

Create your own network by starting a few websites at once, each having a distinct specialization or focus.

Make sure all "sister" URLs contain the best keywords for their specialized subject matter. You don't necessarily need to have only top domains: www.domain.com. You can work with sub-domains instead: www.sister.domain.com. Many hosting companies provide sub-domain hosting free of charge.

• Example: TripSpot, a company that has implemented a very successful multiple-domain SEO strategy. Take a look at the right-most drop-down box at the top of their home page, it is called 'StartSpot Network'. Each listing is a separate site, all joined together in a network.

If multiple domains or sub-domains are absolutely out of question, focus on creating a clever folder structure, i.e. arrange all your HTML files in folders and sub-folders by categories, naming all of them - your folders, sub-folders, and files -with your most desired keywords. If you prefer,use underscore to separate words. It is also advisable for the names containing more than 3 words - makes it easier for your visitors. The result will look in a browser like this:

http://www.yourwebsite.com/folder1withkeywords/file1withkeywords.html
http://www.ottawamassagetherapy/downtownmassage/massagetherapyschedule.html
http://www.ottawamassagetherapy/downtown/massage_therapy_schedule.html

For questions, contact me via my website design Ottawa site