At the beginning of this month I did a post about the difference between exact and broad match search volume. The post was inspired by all the readers who submitted names to my domain contest who didn’t know the difference. It was actually sad to see in some ways as there were a good number of people who thought they had names with great search volume that actually had none.

After the contest I had a few panicked domain investors email me. Most of their stories went something like this, “I bought all these domains thinking they had incredible search volume. Nobody wants to buy them and I’m losing money, I read your post and found-out I was using broad rather than exact, what should I do?”

These are great examples of why no matter what you’re investing in, be it domains, stocks, bonds, real estate, etc. it is absolutely critical to take the time to learn before jumping in. The silver lining is, better to find-out now than two years from now when you’ve wasted even more money. So I decided to take my previous post a step further and show a video illustrating exact vs. broad match search volume to make sure everyone is crystal clear on the difference.

Like it or not, Panda came and changed the face of search forever. Now Penguin has come and it looks like once again, the search world may never be the same. While many people are frustrated with Google as their sites dipped in the rankings, many others are looking for the opportunities ahead now that search works a bit differently than it did before.

I’ve been getting a lot of email from people wanting to know what they can do to rank better now that Penguin is here. Many of you will be surprised to see that some of the main ways to improve your rankings are tips I’ve been giving for years now. It all centers around building a site for users, not for search engines, and this can be a very good thing.

Below are three ways that you can help your site rank better and hopefully bring your blood pressure down just a bit. Don’t worry, it’s all going to be okay, heck, I’ll go a step further, there’s no reason why you can’t even leap ahead of where you were before. Follow the tips below and you’ll be well on your way:

1. Fresh, unique content. This has been #1 on my list for a long time now. Don’t buy cheap poorly-written articles, and don’t even think of using one of those funky content spinners. Get real writers that are passionate about the subject matter to write great articles. Fresh is more important than ever so you’ll need to keep the quality content coming.
2. Backlinks to Internal Pages. Too many SEO companies focused on getting backlinks to the main page of a site. This doesn’t look organic to Google and it shouldn’t! Think about it, there should be more interesting things on your site than just the front page, Google knows this and that’s why they expect to see a reasonable amount of backlinks going to internal pages.
3. Go Easy On The Ads. Users are instantly turned-off when they encounter a site laden with ads, you want to build for the user now so go easy on the ads. If you’re closing direct ad deals you might be in better shape but filling your site with adsense and affiliate offers isn’t going to help.

As always I’d love to hear from you, feel free to share your own tips or ask any questions you might have below. Comment and let your voice be heard!

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I am excited to announce that the second edition of my free guide, Domain Monetization 101 has arrived hot off the press! Actually, there is no press since it’s an eBook but let’s just pretend that it is! While this is the second edition of the guide almost the entire book has been re-written so it might be more fair to call it a whole new book.

The idea behind Domain Monetization 101 is simple – people ask me all the time how to get started with Domain Monetization. Rather than trying to share everything I’ve learned in an email or short phone call I put all the basics together in one guide that I give-away for free. The guide covers Monetization from start-to-finish and shows anyone coding experience or not, how to build something meaningful on their domains.

To get your free copy of the book all you need to do is sign-up for my newsletter. Oh and don’t worry, I don’t send-out Newsletters every day, or even every week. My newsletter is all about education and when I do send it out it’s jam-packed with articles about Monetization, SEO, and Domain Flipping with a focus on specific techniques I haven’t covered yet on my blog.

So if you’ve been waiting to take the next step and start monetizing your domains, or if you’ve been trying to monetize your domains without making much progress, I am confident Domain Monetization 101 will help! If you are already a newsletter subscriber and you would like a copy just shoot me an email and I’ll send it over. Of course feel free to ask any questions you have in the comment section below, I’m always here to help!

Unless you’ve been living in a cave you know that Google has made a great number of changes to their algorithm. Panda was the first algorithm update to really get media attention as it knocked many of the article directories beyond the coveted first page. Many of the old SEO techniques like forums profile backlinks, comment backlinks, etc. became much less useful.

Now Google has rolled-out Penguin, an update that seeks to go a step further identifying suspicious link-building campaigns and sites that are “over-optimized”. Here’s the issue, over-optimized used to be okay and SEO firms would optimize like crazy and charge through the roof for it. In fact, many SEO firms still over-optimize like crazy which means their clients sites are getting penalized.

As a small business going from page one to page two could be the difference between making a profit or dipping into the red. Since many of these SEO changes are incredibly new, many SEO firms haven’t had the chance to change their techniques and focus on the new SEO world that Google has just created. Yes, it’s all about building sites for users, not for search engines, but many SEO companies haven’t made the change left leaving their clients in a bad position.

For this Small Business Sunday I thought it would be a good idea to talk about questions you can ask your SEO firm to make sure they’re doing the right things. You can’t be afraid to ask these questions, it’s better to find-out now rather than wait until later when you’re on page four, five, or even worse – de-indexed. So be confident and ask the questions below to make sure your SEO company is up to snuff.

1. Where are the links coming from? This is the most important question to ask. If their answer is – forums, blog comments, high PR sites, you might want to dig a bit deeper. These techniques used to work like a charm but really aren’t the right way to do SEO anymore.
2. How many backlinks are they adding each month? Understanding the rate at which new links are added is very important because Google is looking at the exact same thing. Add a bunch of links one month, or even worse, one day, and you could throw-up a red flag.
3. How has their strategy changed since Penguin? Forget Panda, have they made a change based on the most recent algorithm changes?
4. Examples of client’s sites on the first page of Google. Don’t be afraid to ask your SEO company for an updated list of client sites and rankings. This is probably something you got when you first hired them, but have you seen an update? What if all the sites they originally showed you on page one are now on page six?

Hopefully you’re SEO company is on the ball and has great answers to these questions, if not, you may want to look for other options. I know a few good SEO companies so anyone looking to switch is more than welcome to shoot me an email and I’ll send over my recommendations. Now go send your SEO company an email now, you’ll rest easier knowing they’re doing the right thing, and if they aren’t, you’ll rest easier knowing you found out about it now!

This week I discovered something very interesting through my post about buying a domain name from one of my readers. In the post I asked for people to submit domains with over 1,000 exact-match local searches, most people clearly had no clue what I meant. What I discovered is that many (and by many I mean most) Domainers don’t seem to know the difference between broad and exact-match. This is incredibly dangerous for investors who think they are buying domains with lots of search volume, when really there is little or in many cases, none.

So what’s the big deal? I’ll tell you.

First let’s talk about the tool that you need to use if you want to understand search volume, there’s only one and it’s the gold standard, it’s called the Google Adwords Keyword Tool and it uses real data from Google. This is the only tool you should be using to get this data, many other tools on the web claim to estimate this but often they are just using Bing data and applying a random multiplier which doesn’t quite work.

Okay, now that you know the tool you should be using, what the heck is the difference between exact-match and broad-match, and why does it matter so much?

Exact-match search volume will show you how many people are searching for the keywords you enter. So if I input “buy insurance” it will show me how many people are searching for the words “buy insurance” on Google. Simple enough right?

Broad-match search volume does something completely different. It shows how many people are searching for the keywords I enter, and other “relevant variations”. So if I enter “buy insurance” it’s going to show me the aggregate search volume for “buy car insurance” “best insurance to buy” and the list goes on, and on, and on. This is why broad match is so much higher than exact match in so many cases because it is a zillion different combinations of words, only one of which is the exact keyword phrase you entered.

When it comes to Domain Development broad match doesn’t give you the slightest clue as to how much traffic you would get if you ranked well for the keywords in your domain. Instead broad match tells you how you’d rank for hundreds or thousands of other terms, all aggregated together. Getting on the first page of Google for all the gazillion different terms that broad-match takes into account really is impossible, you might be able to get on the first page for a handful of them, but that means you’re only getting a small percentage of that traffic.

So why is broad match checked by default?

The Google Adwords Keyword Tool was built for advertisers, and advertisers want to see big numbers because they want their campaigns to reach a larger audience. If I’m a big car insurance company I don’t just want to appear on the first page for “buy insurance” I want to be on the first page for anything slightly related to the concept of buying car insurance, and thus broad match is a great fit.

Sadly, what I found from my post this week as that so many new Domainers have names that match keywords with absolutely no search volume at all, but think they have names with tons of search volume. Chances are they’re trying to sell these names and not finding any buyers and then scratching their heads because they think the search volume is high…when it’s not.

You can get a domain that has a broad search volume of 100,000 on the first page of Google, heck let’s say the #1 spot and only get 10 visitors/month. This could happen because the exact match is only 20.

I don’t mean to burst anyone’s bubble here, but I know that I probably am. Better to learn this now rather than later when you’ve acquired an entire portfolio of junk right? So next time you go to buy a domain and you’re basing your decision on search volume, make sure you’re looking at exact-match otherwise you could be growing your collection, rather than your investments.

Whether you are a seasoned SEO Pro or just getting started in the world of search, link-building tools are critical to your success. The days of gaming search engines has come to an end, all those advantages that geeks have had for years, is gone, in the new era of SEO the playing field is level, as long as you have the right tools.

At the core of SEO is link-building, getting links from high-quality sources on the web. Search engines like Google and Bing use these links back to your site as a key determinant of rank. The more high-quality sources linking back to you the better you will rank.

This is great for some people that are doing big things and getting coverage in major online new sources, but what about everyone else? Link research is all about understanding your market and what links are the most valuable to you. It’s not just about looking at your own links, but looking at where links to your top competitors are coming from as well.

Link research tools give you a window into the top-ranking sites in your niche so you can see what links  are giving them the most juice. You can also see how your link profile grows and evolves and make sure you’re maximizing every opportunity.

Okay, so now you understand why link research tools are important, so let me share my three favorites:

1. Majestic SEO – this is in the #1 spot for a reason. Majestic really has become a mainstay in the SEO world. You can view your link profile along with a velocity that shows how long it takes you to build backlinks for a site. The best part is you can start using it for free and then move up to one of the paid premium packages later on.

2. Raven – when it comes to managing all your links Raven takes the cake. You can easily identify opportunities and assign tasks to team members making this great for businesses that have more than one person working on their SEO efforts. Also the people at Raven are pretty cool too so I give them bonus points for that as well!

3. Open Site Explorer – this was the first link resource tool I ever used and it will always have a special place in my heart. Too sappy? Don’t forget I’ve been doing this since the mid-90s so I used many of these tools when they first hit the market! Open Site Explorer is an awesome tool that is fantastic for competitive analysis and really understanding which links are giving the most juice to your competitors.

If you’ve been procrastinating on your SEO strategy take the time to get started with one of these tools today. You can start for free with all three of these and by just identifying a few good links you could see the kind of progress you’ve been looking for.

One of the most critical pieces of an SEO campaign is rank monitoring, looking at how changes you make to your site impact it in search. The problem I’ve always found is that even some of my favorite tools like SEOMoz only provide updates once a week. Ranking change more than once a week so if you’re only looking weekly, you are missing-out on some very valuable data.

That’s where Authority Labs comes in. They have build a very slick tool that allows you to monitor your website rankings on a daily basis. All you have to do is enter your domain and then provide the keywords you want to track, the tool takes it from there. Below is a sample of what your account might look like once you’re up and running and have a good number of names sites loaded in:

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As you can see, the platform will keep track of your rankings in Google, Yahoo, and Bing (although Yahoo and Bing are really the same) and report daily how your overall ranking across the terms you picked to monitor. Once you click on a specific site you can see the rankings for each individual term and the change day over day:

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Whether you are running one site, or one hundred sites monitoring your placement in search engines is critical. Authority Labs takes it to the next level by offering rank monitoring on a daily basis. The interface is nice and easy to use and the setup is a snap. Also I was pretty excited to be able to get morgan.authoritylabs.com, but maybe that’s just the Domainer inside me!

If you haven’t checked-out Authority Labs yet, you should, this is an SEO tool you should know about.

Lately I have been getting a lot of emails from people asking how SEO has changed in 2012. When this happens more than once a day I usually think it’s time to write a post so I can help everyone at once, and of course all the other people who had this question! SEO has changed a lot in the last few years and yes, the fundamentals have changed. That being said it’s not like Google decides on January 1st 2012 the great 2012 algorithm change goes live, many of these changes have been happening over time and Google’s just turning the dial a bit more.

SEO has changed because search engines like Google get better at making it harder to game the system. When I started doing SEO in 1995 all I had to do was repeat a keyword more than my competitors. Next came the era of getting backlinks from forums and comments, people went nuts, built software to do it, wrote books about it, and it worked…for a while. This era lasted quite a while and built a lot of SEO companies and affiliate marketers.

Then came social media, the Panda update, and a few more tweaks that have made what is now the Google of 2012. It’s been an exciting journey and in the end I honestly think that we all win. Web users do have a chance to see results without the clutter of annoying content farms and scam sites, and all the annoyingly stupid things people would do to outrank you, now leave them high and dry. So what are three ways SEO has changed in 2012, here they are, but remember many of these started long before now:

1. Link Diversity Is More Important Than Ever – search engines learned about a gazillion comment links and forum profile links you were using to rank well for, and they tuned their powers down, way down. Google knows that real sites have backlinks from all kinds of difference places and in all different forms. Image links, social media links, blog article links, are all great examples. There really is no game to this, do something cool or build something that people like and this link profile will come with the territory.
2. Limit Your Ads Above The Fold – it’s official, Google announced that too many ads above-the-fold on your site could hurt your rankings. Luckily this isn’t a huge change for those offending and in the end it really does improve the user experience.
3. Well-Written, Unique, Content – this one has been continually layered-in and tuned-up and really can’t be emphasized enough. The days of content spinning and duplicate content helping you rank are long over. Well-written, unique content is king.
4. Get Social – you should have some nice backlinks from Social Media, let’s face it, Google knows that real brands are active on Social Media.
5. Don’t Build For Search, Build For People – this could be counted as step #5 or just summarized as all of the above. The moral of the story is that building sites for search engines really doesn’t work any more, you need to build sites for real people that they like, use, and recommend.

So don’t worry, the sky isn’t falling, and SEO isn’t getting harder. People just need to do what they should have been doing all along, building great sites, engaging their visitors, and creating lasting brands.

On holidays I always like to do a Google search and see who owns the coveted page one. This year I found that exact-match domains had some solid placement on the first page of Google for the term “Saint Patrick’s Day”. Of course there are some major sites that took the above-the-fold spots like Wikipedia and History.com.

Still there are some great exact match domains enjoying a nice boost in traffic, the two exact-match domains are on page one are:

www.st-patricks-day.com

These guys rule the Saint Patrick’s Day space with a very basic site with lots of Adsense. If you look at their compete data, last year they went from having next to no traffic, to over 200,000 visitors around Saint Patrick’s Day, which means they are probably printing money today. While I’ve never been a huge fan of domains with dashes in them, they do rank just as well as if there were no dashes and this is more proof of that!

www.stpatricksday.com

That’s right, the exact-match domain without dashes actually ranks below the one with dashes. This should come as no surprise though since it’s all about content and backlinks, the dashes do nothing to help or hurt the ranking so they are absolutely equal. It’s amazing what a difference SEO makes, poor little stpatricksday.com only had around 10,000 visitors last year during the same time period according to compete.

One very important thing to note is that what I see on Google page one might be a bit different from what you see. That being said, for trends like this you will see some consistency, still if you see something different, let me know what you see. Either way it is clear that st-patricks-day.com has done a better job with SEO and is reaping the rewards while stpatricksday.com definitely has the better domain, but probably makes about a tenth of what the dashed version does!

Okay, so if you’re reading this you better have a beer in your hand, and let’s hope you’re wearing green. Now stop reading this, drink faster, and ask yourself “why the heck am I reading about Domaining on Saint Patrick’s Day?” Of course you might ask me the same question, but I am drinking a beer while I’m writing this which makes me just slightly less of a geek!

Part of learning SEO is getting past the myths and legends that have been built-up over time. The SEO world is always changing which means that things that might have worked years ago, no longer work today. This is also very important when you’re picking an SEO firm as one stuck in their ways may have not evolved with changes in the industry.

One of the most common SEO Myths I’ve come across is regarding the impact of Meta Keywords in ranking. While the Title Tag absolutely plays a role, and the Meta Description shows-up in search, poor old Meta Keywords got left behind. That’s right, those Meta Keywords that you may have spent hours perfecting aren’t going to impact your rank, at all.

If you’re still not convinced you can hear it from Google themselves, on their blog, Matt Cutts was quoted as saying:

“They simply don’t have any effect in our search ranking at present.” (Official Google Webmaster Central Blog)

So what happened to our old friend, Meta Keywords?

“About a decade ago, search engines judged pages only on the content of web pages, not any so-called “off-page” factors such as the links pointing to a web page. In those days, keyword meta tags quickly became an area where someone could stuff often-irrelevant keywords without typical visitors ever seeing those keywords. Because the keywords meta tag was so often abused, many years ago Google began disregarding the keywords meta tag.” (Official Google Webmaster Central Blog)

You can also see a video of Matt Cutts discussing this topic below, in the video Matt clearly says, “We don’t use the keyword meta tag in our search ranking, other search engines might but Google doesn’t.”

So next time you hear this myth, make sure to send someone to this post or Google’s blog. Heck, you’ll save them some time and it’s always fun to debunk a myth, especially one that seems so alive and well after all these years!