The Daily Feed Issue #9: Building websites that Google (and friends) can understand

I'll be away until Sunday. Since I'm free at the airport, I'll advance post up some interesting sharing. Will be up whole week :D Hope it helps you in gaining the traffic you always wanted ;)

Welcome to Issue #9 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page.

On Tuesday next week we have a big surprise for the blogging community. A week and a half from now is the official launch of our ebook titled "The little black book of free online marketing. From launch to your first 5,000 visitors per day and beyond". Next Tuesday we're doing a verylimited pre-sale of the book at a discount - available exclusively to members of this list. Tuesday's pre-sale is limited to 100 members and we'll send out the details on Tuesday morning so keep a close eye on your inbox.

The book contains over 30 years of combined experience in online marketing. It's written by my co-founder and I and is designed to ramp up your blog or website traffic to 5,000 visitors per day and help you keep growing. If you're just starting out or you've plateaued at a few hundred uniques a day, we have carefully constructed a set of solid rocket boosters to put your site traffic into orbit. Our current business is the massively popular Feedjit and our previous projects have been featured in Time Magazine and the NY Times. We've included a bonus section which I'll tell you more about in Monday's edition of The Daily Feed.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming:

We're continuing our focus on getting and keeping search engine traffic. This week we've introduced a broad philosophy to get and keep traffic from the search engines:

"Create new, unique and useful web pages, host them on a user-friendly website that Google can understand and make sure the right people know about them."

We've covered creating new, unique, useful and user-friendly web pages. Today we're going to chat about creating pages and websites that Google can understand.

Does your domain name matter?

Years ago Google would index search keywords in your domain name. These days your choice of domain name has little effect on your ranking in the search results unless the name contains an obscene word or was used by a black hat (bad) SEO before you and has been black-listed.

The most important factors when choosing a domain name are:

• It must be easy to remember
• It doesn't have to be short. HuffingtonPost is the most popular blog in the world.
• It should have words that are related to what it does. e.g. RescueTime.com sells time management software. MediaPiston.com is a copywriting service.
• It must be easy to spell
• It must be easy to pronounce
• It should not contain dashes - when someone remembers your domain, they won't remember if it included dashes or not.
• It should be a dot-com. .org'ers argue with me if you like, but dot-com's are still the most memorable domains.

I would also avoid domains that incorporate a top level domain into the spelling. For example: "del.icio.us". It worked as a marketing gimmick for Delicious back when they launched, but even they chose to buy delicious.com and replace their original fancy spelling with a plain vanilla dot-com domain.

What about URL structure?

Your URL's should contain words that describe each page on your site separated by dashes. This is not a good URL:

http://example.com/?p=2343

This is a good URL:

http://example.com/how-to-bake-a-cake.html

Search engines index the words in your URL and give them slightly greater emphasis than the text that appears in your page content. You must use dashes instead of underscores. Google treats words separated by underscores as one big word. Here is Google's Matt Cutts explaining why you should use dashes in your URL's. Notice the URL of the page I linked to. It's well formed with dashes separating the words. Matt uses a forward slash at the end of his blog entry URL's. You can also use a .html extension - either works just as well.

Cross linking is key

Every page of content on your site should cross link to other content. If you have a blog, throw in a link to older blog posts you've written at every opportunity. Don't go too wild - just 1 to 3 links are fine. I tend to get peeved at sites that cross link too much, so only link to content that is actually relevant to what you're writing about. As the amount of content on your site grows, you'll have more fuel to cross-link to.

Cross-linking is important because not only does it help search engines find your content, but it helps them figure out which content is the most important. Google does this by calculating internal page rank for each page on your site. It figures out which pages you're linking to most often and emphasizes those pages in the results. The result is that important pages like your home page are ranked higher than content deeper in your site.

That's all for todays edition. Have a great weekend and I'll see you again next week when we'll dive into my favorite part of SEO: Link development, link bait and letting the right people know about your site.

Regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO