For the last several years exact match domains have been the gold of SEO. You could buy one and with relative ease rank the domain on that exact keyword. So, if you had StoneGardenTurtles.com and were selling stone garden turtles than it was somewhat easy to rank on the keyword stone garden turtles. However, if you bought HippyTippyTurtles.com than it meant more work in gaining organic traffic on the exact keyword.

Recently, I have seen a shift with Google that suggests that exact domains have lost much of their SEO value. At the same time, I have also noticed that the usual links I have been acquiring are not as powerful. To confirm my suspicions I reached out to SEOMoz and asked their opinion on the matter.

12/30/2010 UPDATE: My good friend Tyler sent me over a more in depth case study on the LDS Church’s SEO efforts. It comes from a U.K. Web Development firm, and the author breaks down the Mormon Church’s strong points in SEO. Very interesting read!

A friend of mine sent over the below music video by 3 Doors Down. He told me that the video adequately portrayed his frustration about trying to rank a brand new domain on a difficult keyword. When I watched it I couldn’t believe how well the video symbolized the SEO struggle. So, I added my own commentary to the video. If you get any other ideas to add to the video let me know.

Related Posts:

• The Adorable Face of Affiliate Marketing
• The Decline of Exact Match Domains
• The Mormon Church Knows SEO
• 4 Quick Tips On Making A Video Go Viral
• Taking Personalized Marketing to a Whole New Level

Josh Spaulding wrote a fantastic article about whether or not you should build backlinks to your article directory articles (let’s just call these articles, AD Articles). His answer:

“The answer to the question is 98% of the time, no. And 2% of the time, yes.”

link-building Obviously, backlinks are important to a site’s ranking. However, you may find that keeping track of all the backlinks you get becomes quite a chore! In fact, I sent an email to my programming friend to create a software to track backlinks. Yet, I lucked out because recently, a friend of mine passed on a free link tracking software, called Backlink Reporter.

Several of the nice features of Backlink Reporter is that it allows you to keep track of all of the backlinks you have acquired for one or several websites. It also helps you quickly discover which links you previously had that are no longer linking to your site. Obviously, no one buys links , but if they did this tool is great in making sure that they are getting the links paid for.

The nice feature that sold me was that it also tracks the page rank of the backlink. As stated in a previous blog, don’t let the “gurus” fool you, page rank still is a good metric on the power you will be receiving from a backlink.

yodas-page-rank I find it fascinating how everyone is trying to kill page rank, including Google. I was just reading a blog that shared, “Page rank means nothing.” The blog further states:

“Ya, I said it. It’s a loose comparative tool for relative sites but does not rank the site’s productivity. A less than google-perfect site can still be making tens of thousands of dollars. I know this because one of my sites has well over 550,000 in traffic monthly and ranks #1 out of more than 2 million sites… and has a PR of …. ready for this? PAGE RANK 2.”

I don’t doubt the blogger when she say that she is getting “550,000 in traffic monthly” and that her site “ranks #1 out of more than 2 million sites.” What I seriously doubt though is that all that traffic comes from just one single #1 ranking keyword. If so, that single keyword is very unlikely to be “low hanging fruit,” that a page rank 2 site can easily snatch up.

pitch-confusion Last Monday I did a post talking about my Blog Pitch. I concluded that my pitch was “Understanding Internet Marketing.” I have had this as my blog tagline for months and have worked hard to stick with this as my mantra.

However, speaking this morning to my friend, Dan, has pushed me into rethinking MyMarketer. Both Dan and I are a part of a small web marketing team with a large corporation. We have been pounding away with this company websites’ for a couple of years.

I actually started at this company as their SEO expert and then was able to have Dan and another friend, Jared, hired on. At first, all three of us were tripping over each other. We all heavily specialized in SEO, but we also all had strengths in other areas of web marketing.

The BUM Award Back in the day, companies would come up with awards and then give these awards to certain websites. The whole purpose of the award was to stroke the ego of the website and to build links to the company giving the award out. I have decided that if I were to create my own imaginary award I would call it: Blogger Unknown to Many or BUM.

Not just anyone would receive my BUM award—for there certainly are many unknown bloggers out there. No the BUM Award would have to go to the blogger who: 1) actually really was an expert in his/her field (not just a self-proclaimed guru) 2) provided stellar content, amazing value, and knew what he/she was talking about, and 3) no matter how good their blog was or how knowledgeable they really were—the vast majority would still have no idea who they were.

The blogger I would give the BUM Award to this year is Joost de Valk, who blogs over at yoast.com. If you are a die hard blogger (particularly on wordpress) than you probably think I am crazy to believe that Joost deserves the BUM Award. A lot of the well known wordpress plugins are either developed by Joost or maintained by him. He also is one of the most advanced Internet marketers out there. His combination of programming knowledge and SEO is far superior than most bloggers on the web.

blogging-consultant_02-09-2009 One thing that makes WordPress such a great SEO tool is its permalinks. Instead of having dynamic urls that look like they are cursing at you (?%$!), wordpress allows you to create SEO friendly urls found in the settings section. You have several options on how to structure your permalinks, and depending on what you want will ultimately be the deciding factor on how you should do it. Here are some recommendations:

1. /%postname%/ – There are several benefits in having your permalinks like this. First, your link doesn’t look dated when google indexes your page. When your post pulls up in the search engines people won’t be deterred from clicking on it because of the date in the url. The second nice thing about this permalink structure is that if you write good titles you can increase your clicks as well. This is how I have done my permalinks for years. It has only been recently that I have switched over to the next possible permalink structure.
2. /%category%/%postname%/ - I switched to this style of permalinks after reading yoast.com’s WordPress SEO. Using this structure helps me focus on both the search engines and conversion. I am a big proponent of keyword categories. Having keyword categories helps you feed the search bots sections of your website that heavily focus on your keywords. By focusing your url around a category and post title you gain a lot benefits. First, you are able to have your keyword in the url without necessarily having it in your blog post title (though, I would recommend having it there as well). If you feel that your post title will convert better in the search engines worded a unique way, you are not hindered to also include the keyword in the title. If you select your post to be in a keyword category the url will reflect that selection. Secondly, adding categories to your permalink gives just one more place to optimize your keywords. You can have the plural form of a keyword in your category and the singular form in your post title—allowing you to rank on both forms of the keyword.
3. /%year%/%monthnum%/%category%/%postname%/ - The only reason I would advocate this structure is if you are trying to get your posts into Google News. Since google’s mistake of listing an out dated article on United Airlines bankruptcy having the dates in the url have increased in importance. As mentioned in the first permalink structure you increase the chance of people clicking on an older post. However, receiving Google News traffic may outweigh this set back.

Note: All three of these structures must be used in the custom setting in the Permalink section. Just simply copy and paste the structure you prefer and you should be ready to go