SEO Denver

SEO Consultants in Denver helps companies build web pages that drive internet traffic and converts readers into buyers.  Visit our home page to find out how Search Engine Optimization can drive traffic to your company’s web pages!

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Building a Product Web Page that Attracts Traffic and Improves Revenue

The internet has become such an efficient sales tool that many organizations are now rushing to cash in on its potential.  In the rush though, many organizations miss the essential elements of positioning a product using a web page.   If a company fails to hit certain key points in presenting its product on the web, all this effort could wind up being wasted.  If your product web page is receiving little or no traffic, here is how to fix it.
Many of the best business schools continue to focus on teaching the essentials of profit and loss.  However selling in the internet age requires expertise language and communication to harness the full power of the internet.  Without an understanding of common and colloquial language use, many companies are creating complex web environments that fail to reach new customers.

The Product Page
Companies have realized the benefit of creating a product page as part of their internet or web presence.  Constructing that page is easy enough.  Just hire a designer, post the product features and away you go, right?  Unfortunately it is not that simple.  

Page Rank
SEO Consultants frequently get the question, “I have a high page rank, but why am I not getting a position on searches for my product type?”  The answer is fairly simple.  Many web pages were built using the company name as the title.  That title appears again within the header tags and text.  Of course the engines recognize a high page rank – but for the company name.  And who is going to search for the company name except existing customers?    Winning new customers requires a different communication strategy for internet product pages.

Re-Setting the Product Page
Understanding customer usage and language is important in making the product page attractive to both search engines and readers.   This requires asking a couple basic questions:

• How do customers search?
• What do they look for?
• What language do they use to describe the product?

Understanding how a new customer would use the internet to look up information is key to setting up the page to attract traffic.  Do customers typically want to know a great deal of product feature information?  Are they looking primarily for pricing information?  Do customers research their purchase immediately prior to buying or is there a longer deliberation period? 

Understanding what customers are actually looking for is equally important.  Do customers use the internet to find the nearest location to acquire your product?  What are their main concerns when they investigate a purchase?

Most importantly, what language is used to describe the potential buyer’s process in looking for information?  What words are commonly used;  not necessarily in describing the product, but in describing the need that the product meets? 

All of these questions need to be thought through by the web owner to properly set the keywords, title tags and text of the product page so that the page will be likely to attract traffic and convert readers into buyers.  Setting the title of a product page to something like “riding lawn mowers in Dallas” would be much more effective in reaching potential buyers than “Jones Lawn Mower Emporium .”  Who in the world – other than current customers of the Jones Lawn Mower Emporium – would search for the latter term?

Web page titles, header tags and text all need to be organized to focus on the keywords and local geography.  However, they keywords and titles must be relevant to the customer and not necessarily to the seller.  So before building a product page, investigate how users would be most likely to find the page when searching on the internet.  Then build your page using the language your customers would use.

SEO Consultants Denver assist Colorado businesses achieve higher income and enjoy greater revenues using the latest in internet and SEO methodologies.  Contact us today to find out how Search Engine Optimization can bring in more sales – even during difficult economic times.  Contact us today for more information!  Click on the “Contact Us” tab above or call Matt at 303.506.1158 in Denver.  We look forward to speaking with you soon!

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Building More Links Using a Deep Linking Strategy

One of the more common bits of knowledge in the SEO business is the high degree of importance placed on external links that point to your page.  The more links directing internet users to your page, the more ‘votes’ or strength your page enjoys with respect to the search engines.  The more ‘votes’, the better your page ranking on search engine results. 

There are many ways to set those links however, and some methods have proven highly effective in both directing new reader traffic your way, but also in improving your placement on search results.  Setting these links either in blog comments or articles marketed to directories and other blog sites requires some thought.  Most SEO efforts focus on setting links to the main landing page, but miss huge opportunities to focus link attention elsewhere in their web environment.
 
Deep Linking
Links set directly to product pages or pages other than the main organizational landing page are frequently termed “deep links.”  Product pages within a web environment typically focus on one product or service or group of common products or services.  Optimizing that individual page for its own set of keywords relevant to the need-serving characteristics of that product can offer the company greater exposure on the search engines.

A company selling motor scooter parts might have a product line for accessory items like helmets or ‘scooter’ clothing.  A web page within the scooter web environment might highlight these items on a separate product page.  This product page could be optimized for ‘scooter helmets’ or other specific terms, leaving the main page to focus on bigger terms – something like ‘scooter parts in Seattle.’ 

Advantages of Deep Linking
In an effort to increase the number of links pointing to the site, many operators keep their focus on attracting traffic to the main landing page.  Deep linking one’s pages though, can offer multiple additional opportunities to attract traffic and to have the search engines look at some of your pages individually.  Search engines like sites with a depth of knowledge and significant page volume.  So the product page meets two SEO objectives:  it expands site volume, and provides opportunity for specific in-bound page optimization and link building.

Deep linking also enables the web operator to highlight other keywords with directly focused content.  Newer companies will frequently identify a few smaller product niches, exploit them, generate some traffic and link strength to the product page first.  Once some traffic is generated, then attention is given to more competitive keyword phrases.  This approach is backwards from conventional wisdom, but has worked on occasion.

Setting Anchor Text for a Deep Link
Building traffic to a specific product page is no different than the standard SEO effort.  Identify meaningful keywords, optimize the page for those keywords in the title and keyword strings, and then generate external link strength.  Keywords for specific product pages will be significantly different from the main landing page.  As all web page titles should be different anyway, this has to be done anyway.  Then simply set your keywords in the keyword file and base your page headers using those keywords as well.  

When blogging or embedding links in articles, use those same keywords to label the link.  In other words,  a link similar to “scooter safety helmets” that pointed to the scooter safety helmet page that contained the “scooter safety helmet” phrase in the page header and within the content, will help search engines understand that the page has information on scooter safety helmets. 

Deep Linking to product pages when building external links either via blogging or embedding them in relevant articles is a necessary part of an effective Search Engine strategy.   Most article directories allow setting a couple of links within your article, so there is usually opportunity to link to both the main page as well as one or two product pages.     Don’t miss the opportunity to earn a little extra link strength to other parts of the web environment you’ve worked so hard to develop!

Years of experience in the SEO business has shown that the art of attracting traffic is an ever-changing discipline.  SEO Consultants Denver maintain constant watch for changing consumer buying trends to better enable our clients to achieve high search engine rankings.  In most instances, top 5 Google rankings in three to four months are possible given a proper plan and competent execution.  Contact us today to see what we can do to drive more revenue to your company using the internet search engines..

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Investing in Search Engine Optimization Can Pay Off!

Purchasing decisions are usually preceded by research.  As the internet offers ready access to information, the common search engines provide quick access to information important to buyers.  And a website link that appears as a result when the user requests information, presents a unique opportunity for the website owner to earn credibility and possibly, a new sale.

The practice of organizing and presenting a web page so that it will be easily found by the search engines is termed “Search Engine Optimization” or SEO.  When a user searches for information related to a particular product or service, the optimal result would be that your organization’s website will appear and the user will click on it to get the information needed to make an informed purchase decision.   So, positioning the web page to be easily found or highly ranked on the search results is very important.

Organizations of all sizes – particularly the large ones – already invest huge sums to optimize their internet pages for specific user searches.  Savvy marketing organizations wouldn’t invest significant money in an SEO program if it did not provide a significant return on the investment.  

SEO and Small Business
Major companies use SEO techniques to earn new revenue.   But is the same methodology available to earn revenue for smaller organizations?   By using local buying characteristics, even the smallest of businesses can compete with the multi-national corporations to win sales.  Ultimately, the internet is a level playing field upon which all companies can compete.  Winning sales using SEO on a local level is very possible.

Large organizations usually focus their web messages around product and price information.  Smaller, local businesses can also present this same information but have an advantage in that they can present location or other local service information to attract sales from bigger companies.   A well-optimized set of business web pages allows a company of any size to compete with the biggest. 

SEO Cost
Of course the major decision point surrounding investment in an SEO is the ultimate cost.  Google believes that average cost for new customer acquisition using direct mail is about $70.  For email campaigns, this cost drops to $60 and Google’s cost per click model works out to be about $8.   This pay per click model may require users to pay for clicks that don’t result in sales however.  Pay per click also requires customers to click on the advertisement contained on the Google web page.

Averaging cost calculations in this manner may not be in line with your business, but the proportions are informative to examine.  Direct mail is more expensive than email, which I more expense than the Pay Per Click model.    However, once a website has been optimized to appear as an organic result for a user search, that link can earn many new sales and return over and above the amount invested.

An optimization campaign to attract new business using the company web page can take a few months with an investment between several hundred to a few thousands of dollars.  Google’s pay per click program can cost as much as several dollars per user visit.  These costs add up quickly! 

Other SEO Benefits

The real advantage to SEO though, is that the links presented as search results are not viewed as paid advertisements by viewers.  Internet users typically trust the optimized page much more than one they would reach by clicking on an advertising link. 

In short, an optimized page using SEO methodologies can position a company web page to attract viewer traffic and convert readers into customers.   An investment in SEO can efficiently win new customers and build new revenue streams.  As users are more likely to click on the results contained on the search results page before they will click on an advertising link, SEO offers a great opportunity to present your company’s products and services exactly when users are in the purchasing process.  Investing in SEO can be more cost efficient over the long term than many other forms of internet advertising.

With the millions and millions of websites existing nowadays, how does one get yours noticed? The most common means is for it to be high up within the rankings of useful and relevant websites. Google is the most widely used search engine today. When somebody keys in an exceedingly search term on Google, you can only hope that your web site comes up in the first ten pages of results. You are doing not have to take a seat there and just hope, though. There are a variety of things you’ll do to boost your chances of being noticed.

Google came up with a system to determine how necessary a website is. Everyday, Google’s automated programs referred to as spiders “crawl” the World Wide Web. The purpose is to index all the present net pages out there. The knowledge these spiders gather is used as the basis for calculating what Google calls PageRank. This concept was developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Stanford University.

What exactly is PageRank? It is an algorithm that assigns numerical weights to linked pages. The upper the figures, the a lot of important the page is. The PageRank is resultant of how many pages link to your own page. It is of no use to form bogus incoming links to your page though. Google gives additional weight to a lot of reputable sites that link to your page. Bogus and paid incoming links can truly be detected. The algorithm takes into account all incoming links – each external and internal.

This can be where sitemaps come into the picture. As can be gathered from the name, sitemaps are primarily a guide to what can be found in your website. It is a page within your site wherein the user will see the overall structure and informational content. It contains links to all or any the pages in your website.

Will providing a sitemap increase your Google PageRank? The answer is easy: yes it may. As mentioned earlier, the PageRank system conjointly takes into account internal links. The a lot of pages you have in your website, the higher you PageRank. A word of caution is necessary here. Pages ought to contain original content and not simply be copies of each other. Otherwise, your PageRank could actually decrease. As the spiders follow links to urge to net pages, a sitemap can really facilitate the “travel” of these spiders among your site. If every of the pages on your net website are interconnected and are easily accessible from one page, then probabilities are the spiders will realize the necessary information faster and easier. Specialists counsel that you set solely a maximum of a hundred links in one page. If you’ve got additional than that variety of links, you should create completely different sets of sitemaps. In order for the thought of the sitemap to really work, you need to produce a link to the sitemap on every page on your website.

The keys to increasing your PageRank are fairly simple. Embody original content in as several pages as you can. Link your pages together. Create a sitemap to form navigation easier. Offer links to the sitemap for each page. This method, both user and spiders will find all the knowledge that you have got to offer.

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For those who aren’t acquainted with sitemaps, a sitemap is quite simply a map or a guide that lists all the sections and pages of your website. One may find {that a} lot of internet sites have this feature, significantly the HTML sort, for the good thing about users or guests who have specific desires that may be answered by content in your web site that is not readily located by clicking on section links or using search engines. It’s a practical method of ensuring that users of your website can maximise the site to suit their needs.

Aside from the HTML sitemap, other sorts are the Text and XML sitemaps. A text sitemap is a easy text file containing your web site’s list of URLs, and which will then be submitted to an enquiry engine, such asYahoo, to tell them {that the} pages are up. This, then, permits their search engine spiders to go to the positioning and index it for future searches. An XML sitemap, meanwhile, is one in a very formatted file recognised by Google Sitemaps that helps the search engine index your site’s URLs and keep track of changes made within the site.

Those that do business on-line recognise the truth that their sites would like to be constantly updated with offerings and content that are attention-grabbing and in high demand, to stay the business running. As your website grows with more and additional pages, while the increase of comparable sites—your competition—threaten to scale back your hits, an updated sitemap proves more very important within the survival of your venture. Moreover, using all three sorts of sitemaps will help boost exposure for your site.

For this job, homeowners of massive websites or a mess of small on-line businesses will make use of free sitemap generators obtainable online. Buying an unlimited version sitemap generator is additionally a smart idea for the foremost updated sitemaps. You’ll assume of using sitemaps as free or low-value advertising for your business.

Online businesses with constantly updated sitemaps of their websites will build sure Net users who are voluntarily seeking out specific information can realize their manner to the positioning’s content that even closely matches their needs. For instance, when a user will an exploration for a selected product, an updated sitemap will facilitate a website with a wide array of product offerings to be included in the results and give the user with a right away URL. Consequently, each the website and also the user profit from it; with the assistance of a sitemap, the search engine takes the user directly from the results page to the relevant net page, and with a lot of folks simply finding your site, business profits don’t seem to be that far behind.

The straightforward means to create sitemaps for your site is to search out a website generator that creates all three types of sitemaps. One such product is provided by XML-Sitemaps.com, which has basic the knowledge on sitemap generation, plus simple to follow guidelines.

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As the world turns, the internet is obtaining stirred up by these new Google updates spotlight everywhere the web. For the past few weeks folks are recording 2 GoogleBots spotlight on their site stats.

Whereas updates could be sensible for some, it additionally means that “welcome to the important world” for others. If you are one to observe closely those high rankings that your website has been obtaining, you will want to revisit them again. Don’t be shocked to determine that your site has dropped off the face of the earth.

Is Google Killing Over-Optimization?

The a lot of we have a tendency to have a look at what is happening out there, the additional we have a tendency to discover that Google appears to be penalizing websites that “over optimize” their sites. If you try and insert keywords whenever you’ll be able to, you’re over doing it. If you add “anchor text” to any or all your links, you are over doing it. Anchor text may be a new practice however as I’ve stated before, it won’t last long. Most individuals never get to scan or even see the anchor text implemented in an exceedingly website. Anchor text is that the “clarification” that pops-up when you put your cursor over a link.

I tested the “anchor text” theory with my site last week. I only tested one main page that I knew that Google would re-index among 48 hours. The results were terribly negative. As soon because the new data was indexed, the search engine results from that page dropped down dramatically. Again, I removed the anchor text from the page and also the results appear to realize momentum once again.

It is not onerous to come to the conclusion that with thus several of us out there seeking for “google answers”, we tend to tend to implement anything we read in articles, newsletters, forums, etc… among our websites. With this in mind, it’s no wonder the new update might be attacking those that strive too onerous to raise their positions in engines.

Is Page Ranking Dead?

As we where all trying finally to veer off from Google Page Ranking, we tend to currently see another modification in our ranks, another update has hit our doorway and with it has brought new PageRank updates. Is it really a rise/decrease of pagerank? or is it simply the result of the new updates taking a little have an effect on to the pagerank technology from Google.

It really seems like pageranking remains in affect. Several of the newer pages designed nowadays are neglected from pageranking altogether. Now, we tend to will see a little increase to newer pages and a potential increase to older ones as well. Lately before the commotion started, ninety nine% of newer pages barely gave any signs that Google had indexed them and rewarded inbound links to them.

What Will The Future Hold?

Many of you would possibly be thinking, where do we go from here? Truly there are literally 1000’s of you out there that have not older a Google update of this magnitude. You’ll feel confused, unsure, and alone. Don’t worry, you are not the 1st to get hit hard. We have a tendency to’ve all felt the wrath of Google sometime or another. The best thing to try and do is to NOT wait till the storm settles down. No, get out there promoting your web site additional than you’ve ever done. I’ve invariably thought of a hit to my websites a blessing in disguise.

Is Google’s IPO Affecting Change?

Some seriously believe that since the introduction to Google’s new IPO, they have had a replacement found reason to operating more durable at delivering higher results and trully proving to the world that they have what it takes to be the best out there.

How is it that so many people out there currently depend on Google to perform well? What went on to promoting online where so many of us rely solely of Google to create success for our business? Will this not seem strange to you? In our efforts to increase rank, get higher placements, increase our traffic, we tend to have let Google become our parent figure guiding us online and holding our hands.

As we tend to move into the longer term, are we have a tendency to going to allow solely a sure quantity of companies to carry the keys to our future? We want to interrupt free and appearance towards creating new partnerships and help smaller but conjointly deserving search engines to plow the way.

Before this update, you will have felt comfy along with your high rankings but now they’re gone. It’s happened to the simplest of us. Take this chance to urge duplicate and start promoting your site like you’ve never done before. Don’t simply sit there and marvel what happened, use this “ego buster” and increase your own rank.

As for Google’s future, let Google figure that out and keep your specialize in your own future. Go any than you’ve ever gone before.

Till next update, stick with it!

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Denver SEO Consultants provide opportunity in this space for other industry specialists to contribute valuable articles and advice.  Contact us today for more information!

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Emphasizing Your Keyword For SEO

Once you get into the search engine optimization game, you may learn all sorts of basic axioms. Emphasizing your keyword in code is one.

Emphasizing Your Keyword For SEO

Keywords are the key, pun intended, to go looking engine optimization. You want to develop an understanding of what your prospects are trying for in your area of business. Keyword research is the strategy for doing this and a step that should be undertaken with nice precision and effort.

Assuming you’ve got nailed down your keywords, the question arises on a way to use them on the pages of your site. There are many strategies that employment and everyone swears by the one they use. That being said, making positive the first keyword is emphasized on the page is one strategy that I actually use frequently.

For my part, every page on your website ought to concentrate on one keyword phrase. Others like to go with a variety of keywords totaling not more than 13 to fifteen total words. Each approach works, but you continue to have to work out the actual phrase you wish to emphasize. Once you’ve got selected the phrase, it helps to draw the attention of the search engine to it by emphasizing it in some way. To do this, most people immediately assume of enclosing it in daring html commands. This can work, however there is a better way.

Using heading commands such as H1, H2, H3 and therefore on are the simplest way to stress a keyword phrase. The commands tell the search engine robots {that the} enclosed text is the focus of the page. This may only facilitate, but you have to watch out a way to use them. Personally, I follow using them for the title of the page, which corresponds to the keyword phrase I want to focus on. Making an attempt to use them in the center of a paragraph of text is not suggested because it appearance horrific due.

One potential issue with these commands is there size. If you choose a default H1, your text is going to be huge. You’ll counter this by redefining the size if you employ cascading sheets. Regardless, make sure the primary keyword is stressed on the page in one kind or another.

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Initiating a Search Engine Optimization or SEO Strategy can pay off for business organizations of all types and sizes.  Major corporations pay handsomely to optimize their pages to attract traffic and entice customers.  Your company can compete for these same customers, though, by using a careful and patient approach to managing your web presence using simple SEO strategies.   Unfortunately, this is not a quick process.

Google in particular requires a long waiting period to ensure that your organization is ‘for real’ and your site really is about the topic described by your keywords and title tags.  Although nothing is certain about what goes on behind the Great Google Cloud of Mystery, it appears that Google grants favored placement to those sites that are well optimized and exhibit activity relevant to the site content for extended periods of time.  In short, even if you do everything right and quickly get your site indexed; it may be several weeks if not months before you start appearing on the search results, especially for more competitive search terms.

Site owners wishing to compete on Google need to be patient.  They also need to be wary of systems promoting quick rankings or guaranteed placement.  There is no substitute for careful planning and patient execution.

Here is a quick outline of what Denver SEO has been successfully used to bring client websites and blogs into the Google rankings.

• Week One – On Page Optimization (keyword selection, text modifications, title tags)
• Week Two – establish and initiate the Blog Plan (identify highly ranked blogs and sites upon which to comment)
• Week Three – Blog and continue to identify relevant blogs
• Week Four – Article Marketing – construct and submit articles to various article submission sites
• Week Five on – balance article and blog work to build links.  Update site content weekly and blog content at least weekly

This simple strategy is easy enough to execute.  Unfortunately it requires a great deal of time and effort.  Additionally, some literary skill is helpful in composing compelling and meaningful articles.  So to use the internet to attract traffic, one will need to commit to achieving these milestones as well as find the time to do it.

Page Optimization can probably be executed in a couple of days.  If a proprietor has the time to read up on the techniques of keyword selection and carefully compose the initial text and content using these keywords, a good foundation can be put in place.  Keep in mind though that you’ll have to modify this content regularly anyway though, so don’t get particularly attached to a given set of text.

The Blog Plan involves building a weekly plan to not only compose relevant and useful content, but to enact an outreach plan.  The content piece establishes the blog as a useful tool within a given niche while the outreach plan draws readers to your site and sets back links.

Continuing to seek out relevant sites in week three expands the network of sites where links and comments are set.  During this time, the search engines will be seeing links pointing back to your site so the search engines will begin to recognize your site for the content it contains.

Article Marketing is a very time-consuming task.  Including back links within the body of a useful article is hugely valuable.  If you can then place your articles on relevant distribution sites, those that pick up and republish your articles will be placing highly valuable links upon their sites that point back to yours.   These back links are very powerful – especially if those that republish your pieces have high page rank and are within your niche. 

Once you’ve achieved these start-up milestones, it is extremely important to modify on page content periodically and to keep reaching for new blog connections.  Continued outreach is recognized over time by the search engines – particularly Google – and will result in steadily improving search engine rankings.

While we all like to think we are not affected by marketing, imagery and pretty pictures; the opposite is true in almost all instances. No more is this demonstrated than with the varied and crazy world of Twitter backgrounds.

While the quality of your tweets will be all important, the image you present of yourself through your background will help keep visitors hooked. It is not all about glossy finishes though; indeed, more important is regards the info you give of yourself.

Twitter themselves has of course done most of the groundwork for you and, the background selection they invite you to look through is, whilst not extensive, well presented and laid out.

Once we know what we are doing with our Twitter blogging though, then it really is necessary to put a little more effort in; particularly if we want to make it work for us.

The settings page is easily navigable, and selecting to change your background with one of your chosen images from your PC or laptop is self explanatory.

You can select to have your image used in a single shot, which will be modified to take up the entire page. Alternatively, you can tile the image. Which option you choose will be based on your own judgment of course, though it should also be driven by picture quality.

It is also worth paying attention to such areas on screen as your sidebar; ensure all info is presented clearly and concisely – you can’t embed links. Logos can be incorporated too, if you are using Twitter as one of your online marketing avenues.

People who have a website (or a weblog) can have “Twitter follow me buttons” on their site that will send them directly to your twitter page so that they can decide to follow you.  After all, if they are reading your site, they must have an interest in what you have to say.

As with the account itself, backgrounds for Twitter are an opportunity to tell the world who you are; take your time and get it right.

Denver SEO Consultants provide Search Engine Optimization services designed to drive new streams of revenue to your business.  Contact us today by clicking the “Contact Us” tab above to find out how an investment in Search Engine Optimization can yield significant ROI for your organization!

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Free Websites and Blogs – Bad for Business

by AJ Farro

Free websites and blogs can only take a serious entrepreneur so far.  They’re a great sandbox for getting your feet wet and figuring things out, but they’re full of advertisements, gaudy templates and themes that reek of “free”.  It’s like doing business out of the back seat of your car – with a Hannah Montana sticker on the bumper.  Few people, if anyone, will take you seriously.

If you build your business on free sites, you risk losing everything because you do not own the site and it can be taken away from you for any reason.

In May 2009, Facebook disabled accounts with, what it “assumed”, were fictitious names.  People with legitimate accounts that have spent years building personal or business relationships had everything disappear in the blink of an eye.

When I first started using free blogs, Blogger shut down one of my blogs and to this day I don’t know the exact reason why.  It could have been because I was using it to pre-sell affiliate products.  It could also be because I hyperlinked every occurrence of my main keyword to my main website and they considered that spammy.  What did I know, I was a noob.  I couldn’t get back into the blog to fix it.  No amount of contacting them ever got an answer and I was forced to abandon it.  Can you imagine if I had built an entire business around that blog? 

I also know that using free WordPress.com blogs for business purposes is a violation of their terms and they will shut you down, too.

Many people starting out don’t know that because they never read the terms of service.  Stay away from free blogs.  You need to own your own blog or website.  Always remain in control of your business.

Before you can run your own website or blog you need your own domain name and web hosting.  The good news is, it’s cheap to get started and I’m going to give you my personal tips for doing it.

Warning:  Do not take advantage of “free domain names for life” when you buy web hosting.  They are only free if you keep your hosting account with them.  Plus, you will not own the name, the web hosting company will.  Always remain in control of your business.

Domain Registration

I’m not going to get real deep into selecting a domain name because that’s beyond the scope of this material.  However, I will leave you with a few guidelines. 

If you want to be found in the search engines, it only makes sense to include a keyword or two that people are using to find what it is you’re selling.  So if you’re an affiliate selling outdoor furniture, incorporating “outdoor furniture” into your domain name is nothing but beneficial.  BestOutdoorFurniture.com beats TomsDeals.com.  No one is going to be searching for outdoor furniture using the words “toms deals”, but they will be searching with “outdoor furniture”, even “best outdoor furniture”.

Only use a .com name.  Stay away from .net, .biz, .info and all the other dots if you can help it.  People don’t remember extensions so when they type in your domain name they will be typing your domain name and automatically adding .com to it.  So get found.  Don’t be invisible. 

Make a list of several domain names because the chances of finding something that isn’t already taken is going to be slim.  Oh, and to stay out of legal hot water, do not use trademarked names in your domain name. 

A great example of that is new businesses that come on board at Commission Junction or other affiliate networks frequently have no restrictions on their name.  Then affiliates will go hog wild snapping up domain names with the vendor’s name in them and spend weeks or months promoting and establishing an online presence.  Then sooner or later the vendor modifies its terms and suddenly bans the use of trademarked names.  It’s happened to me more than once.  It’s a knife to the core of your business.   

Hot Buying Tip

• Get your domain name at NameCheap.com. 
• $9.69 for a .com name, but use the coupon code and get it for $8.81.
• They don’t sneak stuff into the shopping cart during checkout like other registrars.
• They have a very easy to use Domain Manager interface.
• NameCheap is a great domain registrar, but don’t buy web hosting there because you pay too much.  Just get a domain name.
• Be sure to enable the free privacy manager on the domain.  It will hide your personal details from spammers.  goDaddy charges $8.99/year for privacy protection.  At NameCheap, it’s free for the first year and renews at only $2.88/year after that. 

Web Hosting

In order for your new domain name to be seen online, you need to have it hosted by a web hosting company.  It pains me to see web hosting companies take advantage of their customers, so I will only recommend companies with outstanding customer service and reliability.  I also wouldn’t recommend something I don’t use myself.

Hot Buying Tip

I have accounts at both of these places and both are very reliable. 

iPage Hosting- Unlimited green hosting with an easy-to-use control panel.  Their “anytime guarantee” is the best in the business.  Customer service is outstanding.  Server response time is super.  Free Carbonite PC backups.  Easy blog installation.

SuperGreen Hosting- Unlimited green hosting with cPanel.  Very reliable.  My WordPress blogs run at lightning speed and customer service is quick and courteous.  Easy blog setup.

I hope you found these tips helpful for getting your business off on the right foot.