The Barebone Basics To Professional (Money-Making) Blogging Part 3

Posted by Jozzua on Mar 9, 2009 in Random Blabber | Comments Off

[This is part 3 of The Barebone Basics To Professional (Money-Making) Blogging . Previously we talked about finding a blogging niche. This article is about SEO and finding the right domain name.]

OPTION 1, A Domain Name Related To Your Niche

Last 2006 I conducted an SEO experiment on how fast I could get to number 1 of Search Engine Results for the words “SEO Experiment”. In just 8 days upon purchase of the domain name and installation of wordpress, it was already on the first page.

What’s interesting with the experiment is that the domain I bought was “SEO-WebMarketing.com”. The key phrase targeted was “SEO Experiment.” They are not the same.

Semantically Related Keywords

TIP: At times, the keywords you want might not be available as a domain name. Your alternative would be to find the keywords that are semantically related. If SEOExperiment.com is not available, look for the closest available phrase. Something like SEO-Webmarketing.com might just work.

What are semantically related words? Google and other search engines relates certain keywords together. For instance, search for the word “Apple” and Google will give you something like this:

Instead of showing a definition or link to an Apple (the fruit), we see a link to Apple computers (the company). Google relates Apple MORE to the company than the fruit.

How do you find semantically related keywords? Use the tilde (~) on Google search. The resulting words in BOLD are semantically related to the word or phrase you just typed in.

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

Next thing you need to know about is the idea of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). The theory behind this is – search engines don’t just look at your blog names and article titles. They look at the content itself to determine whether there are a number of semantically-related keywords on the blog.

This simply means – If you’re going to blog about entertainment, make sure the content of your blog is about TV shows, movies and other entertainment news.

This is what Nan does in PhilippineEntertainmentNews.com.

Simple enough, eh? Just buy a domain name that uses the keywords of your niche topic.

OPTION 2: Self-branded Domain Names

The word “jozzua” doesn’t really mean anything. Yet my domain name is now somewhat related to technology and entrepreneurship. Specifically, it jozzua.com comes up on Google searches for “technopreneurship”:

This is your alternative approach to getting domain names. You buy a totally unknown domain name that is not related to any keyword. You then build it up through your links and content.

What’s the advantage of going self-branded? You can buy a shorter name (fewer letters). Jozzua has only six characters. It’s pretty easy to type in the keyboard.

Web Marketing/SEO

Whether you go use an keyword-rich domain name or a self-branded one, you’ll need to do a bit of marketing.

To give you an idea. Here’s a summary of what was done with the SEO experiment domain:

• We began the SEO experiment by showing the initial number of inlinks/backlinks.
• We analyzed this website for on-page optimization. We tweaked the site so it was optimized and traded for links with other website owners.
• The site was prominently filled up with our keywords. We placed it on all title pages, links, and images within the site.
• We added Google analytics, created a sitemap and submitted it to Google Webmaster tools.
• We submitted the site URL to other directories. We joined some SEO related forums and started contributing to the discussions.
• We socially bookmarked the site and had some friends vote for it.

By doing that, we were able to get to the first page for the term ’seo experiment’ against 3,320,000 other web pages (according to Google).

Web marketing get you the audience you need for your professional blogging career. Might as well start smart with a right domain. Now just check out a web host that gives you a free domain.

[This is part 3 of The Barebone Basics To Professional (Money-Making) Blogging . Subscribe now to be notified of the next updates]