I have noticed that many businesses and individuals are letting their webmaster or web hosting company register their web address. Bad idea!!

If you are establishing a new website, or a new business, it is critical, that you register the URL in your name. If you don’t…then you do not own it!

Several times in the last few months, I have dealt with situations in which a client wants to change hosting companies or webmasters and the webmaster has refused to give up the URL. I’m sure my clients can fight the hosting company. And one is consulting an attorney. But the best thing to do is to register the domain you want yourself. Put it in your name. Pay for it with your credit card. That way, there will never be a question about ownership.

Ryan, How long does it take google to notice a change on my website? I’ve put in the title and meta tags that you suggested but things haven’t changed on Google. Why would this be?

The web is huge and even google doesn’t have the resources to notice every change that happens online. It takes a great deal of time for the search engines to reach and index all the various sites. Sometimes it can take days.

But Google Updates Are Nearly Automatic If You Blog

If are using a blog, the usual update rules do not apply. Blogging platforms such a Wordpress have built in “ping” services that notify many services whenever you post new content. That is, you when you click the “publish” button, a notification is sent to services such as Ping-o-Matic, Technorati, FriendFeed, Icerocket, Google Blog Search and others, so that they can come to your blog and index your latest content.

So, the best and easiest way to get Google to your site, is to write a blog post and within the blog post link to a page in your main website. Google will come to your blog and also follow the link to your main website. Sometimes, once you publish a new blog post, you will have an updated listing on Google within the houry

For more information check out Wordpress Pings.

Subscribe to Ryan Nagy by Email

Despite the complexity of the balloon diagram to your right and the ridiculously complex articles that you may have seen about Google PageRank, there is a 10 cent definition with all the information that you need:

“PageRank is the number and importance of websites that link to your website” - Matt Cutts, Google Employee

Get Good Links, Get Good PageRank

Got that? The more high-quality websites that you have linking to you, the better off you will be and the higher rankings that you will have on Google. (As an SEO purist, I must tell you that High PageRank is not always identical to high Google rankings, but for the most part the two are highly related).

How can you get more links? You could create 100 blogs and have them link to you and not get much Google benefit. Why? They are not quality websites. They would be spam blogs or Splogs and they are one of the reasons that Google devised the PageRank system. Google found that low-quality spam websites were making it into their search rankings and they need to get rid of them.

Google search is largely a computer-driven algorithm (you can’t rank billions of websites by hand) so Google needed a mathematical way of calculating rankings, thus “PageRank” was created. New blogs and websites, with few links and little unique content could get an automatic “0″ score and no longer affect the ranking.

What is a quality website link? Imagine for a moment that you have only one link to your website and it is from the front page of the New York Times online. That one link would likely skyrocket you to the top of your specific niche. Why? The New York Times is an important website. According to Alexa the New York Times is one of the top 150 websites in the United States. And Google knows that all links from that site are vetted by a real person (i.e. they are not spam links) and so Google can trust that the NY Times is linking to an “important” site. Of course, there would be other benefits if you get a link from the NY TImes. You are also going to get many visitors and many new links from other websites, compounding the effect.

Human-Edited Links for PageRank

Pay attention to what I wrote above: “Google knows that links from that site are vetted by a real person.” In the old days of SEO, when the raw number of links was the main criteria, automated systems would create 1000’s of links and 1000’s of splogs, and legitimate websites would trade links to get a higher ranking. PageRank allows Google get rid of the influence of spam websites and to give some of the top websites, and some of the top website directories greater impact. It knows that top directories have a real person reviewing each website, filtering out the spam and porn and other less desirable website.

That’s why if you are serious about SEO, you need to be in some of the top directories such as these:

1) Yahoo Directory https://ecom.yahoo.com/dir/submit/intro/ The best link that money can buy.

2) ODP - Open Directory Project - DMOZ
Submit: http://dmoz.org/add.html Free, but can be hard to get into.

3) Best of the Web Directory BOTW and BOTW Blog Directory: http://botw.org (affiliate link) Various options from $75 - $300

4) JoeAnt.com If you are on a budget, one of the best and cheapest links that you can get (currently $39.95).

Those are not the only ones, of course. That’s just a sample of dozens that you can use. Just getting a few links may help you get higher PageRank and..what you really want…a higher Google ranking. But if you are in a competitive industry, you will need many more links. You will want links from trade associations, important bloggers, local directories and any other website that you can find that is related to your business.

The process of link-building is a complex topic which we will explore later. For now, just remember the simple idea that you want a large variety of high-quality websites linking to you, so that you can achieve a high PageRank and higher rankings on Google.

Making the Most of Google Search

When your potential new customers search online do they know to search for your business? Do they know the name of your business? If the answer is “no” or “sometimes” then what is your back-up plan?

How can people find you, learn about you and buy from you even if they do not know that you exist?

The short answer to that question is relatively simple: Get high rankings for your website on Google. (Of course, the Yahoo and Bing search engines are also important). The longer answer is slightly more complex: Get high rankings on the search engines for words that indicate that a person is ready to buy from you NOW.

It can be done.

Basic SEO

As you may already know, the process of getting higher placement on the search engines is called, “search engine optimization” or SEO. The process of SEO involves optimizing “on page” aspects of your website such as the content (words) and website programming (title tags, heading tags etc.), as well as”off page” factors such as getting high-quality links from other websites.

Deeper SEO

But dig deeper into SEO and you will find the need to rank highly for profitable keywords. Keywords that are directly related to your business and to a person who will buy from you. Consider the example of a local pizza shop chain in the New York City area. This chain wants to expand it pizza delivery business.

Should the chain try to rank highly for the word “pizza”? If you do a search for pizza on google you will find that many listings are about pizza, but others are about pizza recipes, pizza games (?!) - there’s even a listing on the ACLU website for pizza -what’s that about? And many of the top pizza results are from national chains who deliver nationwide and in nearly all of the 50 states. It could be difficult to unseat a national chain.

You can see deciding where to put your SEO dollars is not an easy task. A top ranking for pizza may not be possible for this business and if it were, it could bring 1000’s of people to a website that would not bring in revenue. However, there are some options.

Targeted SEO - With a dash of PPC?

1) Targeted Keyword Rankings. Get a high rank for words that would bring in more targeted traffic, such as: New York Pizza, Pizza Delivery New York, New York Pizzeria.

If a person goes to google and types in “NY pizza delivery” you can bet that they are looking to order a pizza.

2) Create and maintain a local listing on Google Local. Google knows the general region that a person is conducting a search from and will show local listings, as you can see in the image below:

Google Local Search Sample

3) Add some pay-per-click to your SEO. You may want to consider a targeted online ad campaign, so that when a person in New York City searches for “Pizza” or “Pizza Deliver” they will see an ad that takes them directly to a page that gives them what they want:

Targeted PPC Ad

There are pluses and minuses to all of the strategies above. However, the cost of doing nothing is 100% negative. Most businesses need targeted keywords to thrive. So get going now. As the hockey great, Wayne Gretsky once said, “You miss 100% of the shots that you don’t take.”

If you are a blogger in need of a low-cost SEO tool to help you write high-powered optimized blog posts, you may want to consider Wordtracker’s new SEO Blogger Plugin for Firefox. It will allow you to view keyword searches directly from your browser as you write your blog post.

You simply type in a “seed keyword” related to the topic of your blog post and SEO Blogger will give you a list of the top keywords related to your topic. And as you see below, it will give you the number of searches related to each keyword and related keyword phrases:

SEO Blogger Screenshot

As of this writing the tool and keyword research is free. I don’t know how long that WordTracker will keep it free, so jump on it now!

- Ryan Nagy

By the way - You can leave the tool open on the side of your browser while you are working, so you can have easy access to keyword research at all times - even if you are not blogging.