That is simply not the case as many web designers, whilst they are skilled in the art of web design don’t know much about SEO.

I have put together a simple video that walks you through three simple checks you can do tha will help you determine how well your website is optimised.

If you have any questions please leave a question in the comments.

redchip lawyers are a firm of Brisbane Lawyers providing a range of legal services to the Brisbane market.  We actually rebuilt redchip’s website using Wordpress as the content management system.

Their previous website was built on a frames based cms which meant that their content was not being properly indexed by the search engines which was a shame as they are a very progressive legal firm with some very stylish offices to boot and their old website did not do them justice.

Our SEO work included:

• Keyword and market research
• Competition Analysis
• On Page optimisation which is writing title tags, meta descriptions and editing their copy.
• Off Page link building to help improve their rankings.

It’s going to be exciting to track the traffic improvements as they move onto Page 1 for their primary keyword phrase.  If you are looking for a good Brisbane based lawyer or solicitor you should contact redchip lawyers via their website.

The topic of the day is “Discover how to Grow a New or Existing Online Business or Website”

I was a participant at the Digital Futures Event in 2008 and the event was very informative with some great speakers.

Speakers this year include:

• Russell Bullen – Online Marketing Collective
• Steve Huff – Sixty Second Parent
• Yean Cheong – Mitchell Communications Group
• Matt Forman – Traffika
• Edmund Pelgen – MarketReach SEO

If you are interested in attending, tickets are $295 + GST and can be purchased at the Sunshine Coast Innovation Centre website.

You can watch the video here.

I know what it’s worth to me because those visitors have been coming to one of my websites.

What would that be worth to you?

If you assume a worst case conversion rate of 1%, that is of all of the visitors to your website, only 1 in 100 bought anything at all, then using my traffic figures that would generate 149 sales.

If you made 149 sales of your product, how much would that be in gross sales and net profit?

It’s pretty straight forward to work out your gross and net margins for your own product.  You should also think about what the lifetime value of that cusotmer might be if you made additional sales to them.

Also ask yourself whether you could do better than closing 1 in 100 prospects.

If you closed 2% then you would have made 298 sales from that traffic.

Why am I showing you these numbers?

As this website is just over a week old it’s tough for me to use it as an example of how the right keyword selection, understanding your online competition and using the right link building strategies can get you high rankings and search traffic.

So I’m using one of my own affiliate websites to demonstrate this.

Here are the interesting statistics:

• 92.4% of my traffic came from search engines.
• 80% of my traffic or 13,099 visits came form Google
• Searchers used 5752 keywords to get to the website.

The beauty of this website was that we used detailed keyword research to identify a range of high traffic, low competition keywords that we could easily rank for.

It’s the same strategy underlying everything I do for clients.

It is about getting found by customers looking for your product and service in that geography.  The video is simply an introduction as there are many strategies and tactics that can be used to get found by local businesses.

Don’t think this is important?  Consider that at least 60% or more of all searches conducted online are thought to be local in nature.

If you have any questions please comment below and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Little did I realise how hard I was making it for myself to get a high search engine ranking.

The reality is that having a keyword rich domain name helps to get you a high search engine ranking. It is not the only variable but from my experience it has a decent impact in low to medium competition niches.

On Page and Off Page Factors

The domain name is considered an “On Page factor”. That is it is one of the factors that you as a website owner can influence when optimising your website. Other on page factors include:

• Use of Keywords in the Title tags
• Use of Keywords in the Meta description
• Use of Keywords in the Header tags

Where a keyword phrase has moderate to low competition (Competition being measured by the number of other pages targeting that keyword phrase) then on page factors, such as the domain name have more of an impact in where your website ranks.

For highly competitive keyword phrases the “Off Page Factors” which are beyond the manipulation of the website owner, are much more important in achieving high search engine rankings. The number and quality of backlinks, that is the number of links to your website from other websites are far more important to search engine rankings when the keyword phrase is highly competitive.

Examples of Keyword Rich Domains

I run across examples of this every day.  In fact during my analysis of the “SEO” niche in Australia that I was doing for this website I came across a great example of the impact that a good keyword rich domain can have on your rankings.

Keyword: “SEO Expert”

The keyword “seo expert” receives 145 daily searches in Google.com.au.  An analysis of the top ten websites that appear in Google.com.au appears in the following screen shot.

If you look at the highlighted line you can see that the website www.seoexpert.com.au ranks in position 5.

Under the column BLP (Back Links to Page) you can see that it has only has 46 external links pointing to its home page.  In addition it is highly optimised for this keyword phrase with the keywords “SEO Expert” appearing in the Title Tags and the Meta Description.

All things being equal, Google uses the number, quality and relevance of these back links as a de facto measure of authority.

The website below it in position 6 has over 7,000 backlinks.

If that does not demonstrate the importance of a quality domain name I don’t know what does.

How to Choose a Domain name for High Search Rankings

The reality is that most if not all of the good domains are in use or have been snatched up by domain squatters.  Still that does not mean you can’t be creative in your domain name selection.

Regardless of what your business is called you can still use a generic keyword rich domain for your online presence.

Use modifiers to create a keyword rich and moderately brandable domain name.

Examples include:

• www.myweddingfavors.com
• www.printedtshirtsdirect.com

You see where this is going?

I use a Domain name generator called www.makewords.com which lets you generate domain names by theme, or with a variety of affixes and suffixes saving me a lot of time.  The great thing about this tool is that it tells you whether a domain is alrady registered or not.

Choose a Country Specific Domain Name if relevant

One again, if your business is country specific then try to use a country specific domain.  My personal testing and testing by others indicates that all things being equal a country specific domain will rank higher than a dot.com for searches conducted within that country.  If you live in the US then this advice is moot.  Go with the dot.com.

Minimise the number of hyphens used in the domain

I recently read that someone tested a domain name with 14 hyphens and it still got indexed by Google.  But it looks ugly and I bet it doesn’t covert at all.

Try where possible to use  a modifier like My or Direct rather than hyphens.  They look ugly and most people forget to type in the hyphen anyway.

Then again if you’re looking to get traffic from natural search, it’s the ranking that counts.  Still a domain with too many hyphens can impact on your conversion rates simple because many lower quality adsense websites were created using such domains and people have learned to distrust them.

So now you know how important a keyword rich domain can be for your rankings you have no excuse to get into a bidding war with domain squatter.

This business is all about getting your business website onto Page 1 of Google!  And not just becasue that’s cool and you’ll  have bragging rights at the pub.

The reality is that 90% of the clicks that happen from any search occurr on Page 1 of the search results.  If your website is not there it’s missing most of the traffic action that is there to be had.

Prior to setting up MarketReach SEO I ran my business under the banner of Market Reach, and pretty much most of the work I did was web design.

From my personal experience, we spend far too much time worrying about the look and feel of our websites rather than how we are going to get traffic to them.  Hey I’ve been there…..we invest so much personal time and effort getting the look right, going back forth with the designer until it’s just so and you know what?  None of it mattered because no one ever really saw the site.

And you’re burnt out from all of the emotional effort you’ve invested in building your website that you just don’t want to even  think about the next step which is promoting it.

Well what if you knew that being on Page 1 of Google could literally transform your business like it has for many other small business owners.

And the reality is that for most small businesses servicing a local region, getting on Page 1 is much easier than you might think.  In addition with the development of Social Media, and the different ways that Google is delivering search results there are a ton of opportunities to get multiple Page 1 listings.

Why don’t you Contact me and we can talk about how getting on Page 1 can help your business.