Shifting focus from music for a moment, I had a discussion on this very topic this morning at work and I thought it would make a great blog post. I’m going to come back later today and edit formatting, and of course follow my own advice and insert anchor text to referral links, etc., but I think these concepts are pretty on target. What do you think?

-          Always hyphenate

• Ex: widget-corporation.com
• Search engines read and define words like humans; “widgetcorp” is not a real word, but “widget” and “corp” are real words that can be indexed.
• Hyphens act as spaces
• Underscores also act as hyphens, but are much less natural to type and read

-          Choose optimized keywords

• widget-marketing.com
• widget-advertising.com
• widget-living.com

-          Try a simpler domain

• lets say widget.com is already registered
  • .co, .us, .info, .biz are available, but less common…

-          301 Redirect

• Ensure there are no duplicate landing pages aka mirror pages; search engine penalization likely
• If not an 301 auto-redirect:
  • Create a simple landing page out of the old domain that auto-redirects to the new domain after a few seconds
  • The only content on the old domain is a redirect message, and perhaps the company logo and social media icons

-           ‘If Content is King, then Inbound Links are Kong’ – Unknown

• Refreshing a brand with a new domain, with redirects pointing to it is absolutely OK, and recommended for optimization. However, that site cannot be copy-pasted over with optimized keywords and let sit and wait to be ranked.
  • Relevant, and constant content updates must be added to the site; once or twice a month, or even weekly on a blog with good external links, and page content must be refreshed and monitored periodically for performing keywords and links.
    • Every time new content is added, you grab a search engines attention, and it indexes you again and again; more frequently with increased addition of relevant content.
    • This creates influence over a topic the domain can claim, called “Domain Authority”
    • High-quality, inbound links go hand in hand with all of this new content. Anchor text to external and internal links within the copy of a blog post or permanent site page.
    • Link building becomes a necessity, and not an option for increasing search ranking. Keyword analysis will take a site only so far in optimizing content, but high-quality inbound links are the umbrella in the drink – the last ingredient that will generate indexing and higher ranking.
      • These inbound links tells search engine ‘spiders’ that the site is ‘important’ because of these referral links, and will then rank it higher in relevant searches
      • Link Building is accomplished through high-quality blogging, business directories, and social media creating a ‘viral loop’.