Anointed CEO

Choosing the domain name for you business is not difficult if only there’s not much pollution in search engine marketing industry.

There’s a little debate if domain name is a factor in search engine ranking.

The very reason domain name exist, is for people to remember.

It’s easier to remember “yahoo.com” than “69.46.103.131″ isn’t?

With that in mind, here are my advices in choosing the right domain name for your business:

• The domain name must be easily to remember.

• The domain name must be easily to spell.

• Avoid using dash (-) if possible. Use it only once if necessary.

• If your customers are local or national market, use country code top-level domains (ccTLD). Examples are “.us” for United States and “.ca” for Canada. This way, search engines can automatically know your target visitors are.

• Use your business name us domain name.

As you see, those advices are mostly common sense and not complicated. Go ahead and register your domain name to registrar like GoDaddy.

To improve the ranking of your business website on local searches, you have to tell search engines like Google that your website targets local customers.

One basic optimization is to put your business address, including the zip code, and its phone number in your website in text format and not in a picture or image. This makes your information crawlable by search bots.

This tip seems obvious but you’ll be surprised how many small business website I’ve seen have their contact information in the image or inside a flash animation.

It’s best to put your business address and other contact information at the footer of each page of your site. This is on top of the full information at your main “Contact Us” page.

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Here’s the video of Matt Cutts, Google’s head of WebSpam team. He gave some tips for small business owners in optimizing their website also some general search engine optimization ideas. This video was taken last quarter of 2007.

Too many small business websites was designed without their target users in mind. I think the web designer is up to please the business owner and had overlooked how the website will actually help the business.

Even worst, most business owners really don’t know what design is good and awful, and yet they call the shot.

Well, It doesn’t matter as long as both parties get what they want.

Poor business owner. Poor web designer.

Confession: That’s my story in my first job as a web designer back in 1999. The time where having a website is considered remarkable for small businesses.

Nine years after, I am still seeing how many business owners are victimized unintentionally by web design firm or consultant.

When will this end?

It will end on this blog. If you’re a business owner or a web designer, I’ll be giving away free information to help you to have a better website for your success. Subscribe to my RSS Feed.

The big “G” (Google) uses a snippet to give searchers a preview of what a certain website has to offer. These are text normally taken from the text surrounded by meta description tag. It looks similar to this:

<meta name="description" content="Free Internet marketing tips for local and business owners. How to beat your competitors using new marketing strategies. Marketing your small business for BIG profits." />

That’s the description of this blog’s homepage.

Since it’s the text being displayed in search engine results, it is imperative to give serious thoughts when writing it so your customers will click your link among other 10 results. Many users will only search one to two times in Google and if they can’t find what they’re look for, they will assume the information is not available online.

So you should take every opportunity to improve your chances that will help your small and local business website to get more traffic.

How can you increase your Click Through Rate (CTR)?

1. Use the keywords or phrase on your description that your potential customers uses to search on your product or services. Google highlight any word that matches the users query. The more highlight the more your link will get attention.

2. Use a call to action like “Click here”, “Download it”, “Get it”, etc. Of course you have to give what you’ve promised on your description page once the user arrived at your landing page.

3. Use appropriate enticing words like “Free“, “Tips“, “Secrets Revealed“, etc. Did you noticed my description?

Think of your description as an ad copy in a crowded ad space. Your customers have a lot of options. To make matter worst, you only have couple of seconds to convince them to click the link to your site.

Note: Your description should accurately describe what the content of a page is. Don’t trick users just to get them to your site and then hope that they will buy from you.

Go ahead and try these tips and enjoy more targeted customers to your website.

If you like what you’ve read, please subscribe to my RSS Feed to receive future tips.

There’s no question that html title tag is one of the most important element in onsite search engine optimization.

If you’ve no idea what it is, check your web page source code and just above the code, you should see similar to this:

<title> Anointed CEO </title>

The title appears on user’s browser title bar. It’s also the text that most search engine use in listing search results.

How important is the title Tag?

Search Engine Checks Title Tag to validate the content of a page
The core information in your web page should accurately reflect on your title. If your in a business of selling dog food. You should have at least that phrase on your title tag. Example of your title could be “Dog Food and Health Care Store” or “Affordable Dog Food Store“. If you would like to target local customers, you may want to have title like “Dog Food Store in Calgary“, “Affordable Dog Food and Supplies in Calgary, Alberta“, or “Calgary Dog Food Store“. Every page of your website must have a unique title based on the content.

I highly recommend using a catchy title so you have higher chance that searchers will click on your link from the search engine results list. Use the terms or lingo your customer use if possible.

Upper or lower cases doesn’t matter on Search Engines. It is not good though to have title all in upper case. Some Internet users interpret upper case as yelling which will not help your small business in anyway.

How long your title is should be?

Many people stuffed their title with keywords they want their site to rank on. Like “Dog Food Food for you Dog Dog Food Store Affordable Dog Food“. You may not be penalized search engines by doing it but I don’t think it will increase your chance to rank or click through rate. It’s annoying for users to see this kind of title from list.

Five to eight words should be enough to describe the content of a web page. Write the title in a manner it is pleasant to read.

The bottom line is, your html title tag should be for your customers first and search engine second. If your title will appeal to your customers it will likely to appeal to search engines too.

Good news to three lucky small business owners in Calgary.

In commencement of EffiStrat Inc., we will be giving away Free professionally designed business website and Internet marketing consultation to its owners. This is no obligation or hidden fee offers.

So why are we doing this? I believe in what the scripture says “Give and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over.”

If your business has an existing site, we can re-design and implement ethical Internet marketing strategies to your website.

With nine years of experience of our staff, it’s almost guaranteed that your site will bring you new customers few months after its launching.

Remember, we’ll only take three (3) businesses. Here are few guidelines to qualify for this free offer:

1. Business should be registered and running in Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
2. Business should be categorized as small and local business.

Send your application with the following information:

1. Business Name
2. Date the business was registered.
3. Location of the business.
4. Industry of the business.
5. Products and services offered.
6. Number of employees.
7. Do you have an existing website?
8. Why do you think your business should be chosen for this free website and Internet marketing services?

This is completely free and you have nothing to lose. Submit your application to support [at] effistrat [dot] com. If you have questions just drop a comment on this blog.