I sent an email to someone today to explain what advantage a good, relevant, keyword rich domain name is when trying to be number one on Google for a search term such as "Charlie Bears". So I thought I would share this information.

Search engines look at both the website address and inbound links to a website when deciding what the sites content is about. So to a search engine and anyone that doesn't know any better a website address like www.charliebearsuk.com or www.charliebears.uk.com looks like a pretty official website about Charlie Bears.

Here are a few examples to help explain what I mean by inbound links:

1) www.charliebears.com (This would be an inbound link to "http://www.charliebears.com" with the link text "www.charliebears.com")
2) Charlie Bears (This would be an inbound link to "http://www.corfebears.co.uk/osc-22-Charlie-Bears.php" with the link text "Charlie Bears")
3) look at this bear website (This is an inbound link to "http://www.charliebears.com" with the link text "look at this bear website")

When Google decides which websites should be at the top of the listings for a "Charlie Bears" search the main thing they look at is inbound links and the link text that is used. So simply speaking the more a site has links to them using the link text "Charlie Bears" (plus variations that include those words), the higher up the listings they will go.

When websites naturally acquire links from directories, blogs or any other websites a variety of link text will be used. Things like "view the website", " view site", "click here" and in many cases the whole website address. This is where having the website address www.charliebearsuk.com , www.charliebears.com or www.charliebears.uk.com is very beneficial. Sites with a website address that include the words "Charlie Bears" stand a much better chance of obtaining more inbound links with that link text and therefore be listed higher for that phrase when people search on Google.

Notes/disclaimer:

I understand Google says there are 200 factors that dictate which site is the most relevant to a phrase like "Charlie Bears" but inbound links with good anchor text trump every other factor in my opinion.

Using link text such as "view the website", " view site" and "click here" is not good practice. Use descriptive link text where possible.

www.charliebears.com is the official Charlie Bears website.

SDinternet promotes the www.CorfeBears.co.uk website.

I’ve noticed a few blog posts recently regarding the reliability of the relatively new canonical element. This element or meta tag can be used to resolve duplicate content issues where web based content can be accessed from a variety of URL’s.

For instance your website homepage could possibly be viewed by navigating to www.site.com/ or www.site.com/default.php or even www.site.com/default.php?action=home. Internal and external links could point to all variations making it difficult for search engines to determine the primary document. This can lead to a fragmented internal link profile and possible penalties for duplicate content.

Implementing the canonical element in the offending page allows you to indicate the primary document.

I tested this on a clients site, where the homepage was indexed in Google under two different URL’s. It was a great success; within 24 hours of the homepage being spidered the duplicate page was dropped!

The other day I did a quick tweet (post on twitter.com) about an e-commerce site that I'm marketing. Today I looked at the back links to the e-commerce site and the twitter link is being recognised by Google (from my Twitter profile page).

I expected to get the odd link from syndicators of twitter but I thought twitter added nofollow to outbound links.

The Webpronews.com newsletter is always very informative and this morning was no exception. It was all about social networking and micro-blogging. Twitter seemed to be the main focus of the article so I thought I would give it the once over.

The Twitter site seemed very basic in design and uncluttered. I would say overall Twitter is more like a cut down version of Facebook than a mini blog. It's got the social element of Facebook and the posting functionality of a blog, only you're limited to 140 characters for your posts. So it's more like a status update than a blog post. (more...)