Helping Hand SEO

If you’re not a believer in internal linking helping with SEO, I’m going to make you one shortly by giving you these 7 big reasons on why it works.

Very recently I decided to go through an old site that’s a few years old (that I’m still active on) and use my updated SEO knowledge to help the old posts I wrote on that, to site rank better. One of the things I started doing was going through just about every single page and post I had, and simply linking it with other, newer and older posts. 

This is so far showing me positive results, and throughout my time doing it, I began to appreciate this SEO strategy far more than when I first heard about it’s importance. Because I now know so much about ranking websites, I can tell you that this strategy HAS to be on your list (here’s 10 overall that when combined make for great results).

Update: This list has now upgraded to 15! Here they are.

Oh and if you’re not already clear on what internal linking is, here you go:

Now these 7 reasons I’m going to give you are not exclusive perks…

In other words, when you simply start using this strategy, you aren’t just getting 1 benefit out of it, you are actually getting 5. I’m just giving you specific reasons as to why this is happening and why it’s good!

1) It allows Google spiders to crawl your content/site better. 

Imagine writing a 3,000 word article (nice job by the way if you can do this) and including 0 links on it. When Google visits this page, it will ONLY crawl that page and it may very well rank it high because it has so much content.

But consider what would happen if you JUST added 10-20 links on that same article to others you’ve written on your site. Now when the crawlers come (how often does this happen?), they’ll not only crawl that same 3,000 word article, but they’ll also visit the other 10-20 you’ve shared on that same page.

That allows for BETTER crawling throughout your whole site (better to crawl multiple pages than one!) and that itself already helps Google appreciate and rank your site better. Just make sure they are labeled as dofollow. 

Note: If you have a new site and are unable to interlink a lot, don’t worry. Focus on creating more pages of content on the site and then later going back to old posts and sharing those new links on them, that’s what I did and it provides the same benefits.

And also in general, doing this stuff improves link juice across the site as a whole, which is a MAJOR plus for your SEO.

2) It speeds up both indexing and ranking.

The faster Google crawls content you put up, the faster it’ll index it and you DO want that.

Suppose you have an article you put up that shares other articles you’ve written which haven’t been indexed or crawled by Google yet.

By simply pointing to them on the same article, the crawlers will visit it and index it faster. This means you’ll be seeing faster rankings in the long term process.

Note: This is not 100% mandatory to do by the way, but it helps. You can actually index your NEW content within hours by using Webmaster Tools.

3) It allows your traffic to appreciate your site better.

While Google itself appreciates this strategy for crawling purposes (and ranking too), when you get organic traffic to your site, and they see these links within the content, some of that traffic will click on it and visit those pages. 

The very act of traffic clicking to other posts you provide within your articles itself is already a positive attribute of SEO. Why? Because it allows for several things to happen simultaneously: 

4) It allows for users to stay on your site longer.

This helps them read and enjoy more of your site and if you don’t know, Google likes it when a user stays on your website longer (they do track this). The more they explore = the more they like it or at least find it curious. 

5) It gives users the option to share your content.

If you’re a good writer and can put out articles that get people reading and commenting on it, then there’s also good chances that they can share that. Giving people more reasons to read your other articles through the art of interlinking makes this even more possible and if you don’t already know, sharing content on social media is also a positive way to improve SEO.

6) It revives, old, dead articles. 

The more you blog on a site, the more odds are that overtime, you may have articles that were crawled, but didn’t really see or get any improved rankings. This happens to pretty much every site. 

Now one of the ways these old pages that were forgotten by Google can get revived and possibly still see great traffic and ranking improvements is by having other pages on your site point to them, thus sending crawlers, and traffic to them to leave comments, shares and at the very least, have them get read by people who would not have seen them had you not pointed to them.

In the process of this happening, that same “dead” post can get revived and see higher rankings and that original effort you put into it can still see great results from. It literally requires very little effort on your part to make this happen…

Just link other articles on your site to it!

You will WANT to do this for dead posts which target good, valuable keywords. Through this act, those posts can still see results. 

Note: Keep in mind the 10 optimization tips I included here too. That can also help these dead posts arise again.

Remember my old that I mentioned? Read this:

On my old site, as I went through my old posts, I counted at least 100, yes 100 posts that weren’t getting any traffic and since I’m still optimizing my site, that number could grow higher. 

That means that as of right now, I have at least 100 articles (which have OK content) lying around, and not attracting ANY traffic. That makes all the combined effort I put into them USELESS.

But that changes once I start interlinking to them. And even if those posts see no improvement and rankings, I will know without a doubt that I did everything I could.

Either they stay the same in rankings or they rise, it’s a win either way for my SEO efforts, because interlinking itself is appreciated by Google and that may help other parts of my site if not directly those dead posts. But look at this:

7) It can get more people to more parts of your site to comment on it.

This is even better than sharing on social media, because comments from people get a lot of positive points from Google. Your goal of course is to make content that gets people to visit those other pages you point to and comment on them.

If you can do that and can get comments, a lot of that content production handles itself because the people who visit your site will be putting in their own, individual effort to write the comments, that’ll count as content and raise your rankings without you lifting a hand.

Just imagine 1 person who visits your site, who is very enthusiastic about the things you write. It would be in your best interest to have that 1 person go throughout your site and leave comments on various posts. 

But you’ll want to make that process easier them. Rather than making them manually browse your site and look for content they like, simply point them to it on the article/s they land on, so they can enjoy it would pausing their reading experience.

If you write good content, you WILL eventually be getting 1 or multiple people browsing your site and leaving comments or at least browsing around and that will be picked up by Google and awarded positive SEO points.

And by the way, here’s a quick question…

What do comments allow you to do more of?

They allow you to interlink even more. I do this on many of the comments I get and it only improves SEO.

For example, some comments ask me questions on the article I wrote and in many cases, I can respond and point them to another article to answer that question. 

This is an awesome way to expand the ways you can share stuff with people on your site. And trust me, as you go through my site, you will see my actively doing this within my comments section.

How does one intelligently use this strategy?

One of the best ways I can suggest that you handle this is by reading this very article and seeing where I personally provided links to. Notice how the articles I share with you throughout this article fit into the context of each point I make.

You should aim to do this too. Don’t worry about structuring your articles the same way I do. But at the very least, keep in mind the structure I have in this particular article (or others on this site) and try to do that on yours.

It WILL get a lot easier and you will find MANY opportunities to share your older and newer content on posts you write. And by the way, you can also practice this strategy on IMAGES you put on your site. It has the same potential benefits 🙂

The look of your site matters, not just for the people who see it, but to search engines too. Let’s look at 5, FREE WordPress themes that are great for SEO.

The reason I picked these 5 is because I’ve personally made websites with each of these and gotten sales out of (Organic rankings too of course!). I have a list of 5 sites I monitor and explain in this post and they all either use one of the above themes or have used it.

But admittedly, the truth is that these choices, aren’t all that special and I could literally point to countless other options you can choose from. In fact, if you have your own options that aren’t on this list, tell me which ones you like below!

But while, there’s nothing really special about these templates I gave you, I am suggesting you use them if you can’t afford paid ones.

Why? Because…

There’s 3 components of a good WordPress template when it comes to SEO:

And these options have most of these components:

1) It has to absolutely be mobile friendly. 

Considering more than HALF of all online searches in Google are now made through a smart phone or tablet, you need to make sure your site is optimized to show up perfectly on these devices. ALL 5 of these templates are mobile friendly.

In fact, if your site is not optimized for this, it can potentially rank well on laptops and computers, but not have the same ranking privileges on smartphones. That means you can potentially be missing out on getting two times as much traffic to your site. Mobile friendly themes ARE a ranking factor.

If you’re not using one of the options above, check to see if your site is mobile friendly here.

Believe me, if it’s not, it will show up in an ugly form to mobile users and that affects their experience on your site, which affects the SEO results too.

Don’t make this simple mistake.

2) The simplicity of a WP theme matters.

I did say the look of a website is important, but that statement may be misconstrued incorrectly. The truth is, a good looking site is a subjective thing…

• Some may consider that to mean a site has to look flashy and professional.
• Some may think completely differently.

But since we are relating this subject to organic rankings, the truth is, the more simple looking a website is with it’s template, the better it is for rankings and here’s why:

Great looking, professional websites that have a ton of images, flash programs playing and all of that stuff typically:

Take longer to load…

This is bad for rankings because a longer loading website means users get frustrated for it to show up and it may cause them to leave. And even if they do land on one of your pages, going to another means having to reload the site all over again. 

The SPEED of the loading matters A LOT and you can actually test the loading speeds of your site here. Simple themes like the ones above load fast and get people to their desired content faster.

If you want more professional looking sites to load faster, you need to get yourself some outstanding hosting (free hosting won’t cut it and it may actually make it worse) and that will cost you a lot of money, which if you don’t have, stick to the simple ones I listed.

Like I said, their simplicity makes them load quickly and that impacts rankings positively, 100%.

Simple themes are easier to navigate on…

I will almost ALWAYS take a simple looking website over a flashy looking one and having made $100,000’s of truly simple looking sites which use the above templates and even plain HTML sites, I am telling you folks this:

Simplicity is a major factor for SEO.

One of the most important things on the site itself is content and getting people to read that content, without interruptions, without flashy pictures and other annoying things (which already affect SEO negatively).

The better you can get people to view and read your content, the better it is for rankings. Keeping people on your site is one of the major contributing factors to positive rankings and the simpler looking a website is, the more it’s owner can create content that is readable without interruptions.

For example, even though I am personally using a paid theme (not being hypocritical here, I still have sites with the above themes, I just like this one personally), it’s SIMPLE and it doesn’t load slowly.

3) The rest is up to the site owner, not the theme.

Once the template you chose for your WordPress site is selected, is mobile friendly and loads quickly, the next truly important thing, and what will take up most of your time is optimizing the site itself so that it ranks better.

Now with this part, people make the mistake of looking for special tools and programs that optimize their site for SEO and neglect that it’s actually the content they create which matters.

For example, I use very simple SEO tools on my site (and there are a few decent ones, which I’ll create a list on soon), but they are just one of the MANY pillars to making my site rank high and just focusing on that 1 pillar gives me absolutely no boost in rankings.

If you seek to make the third option work best for you, read this blog post on 3 trends you have to focus on to get high rankings and most of them really focus on the ability to make great content.

Now that content that you create can itself be optimized for better rankings using these 10 tips, which I implement in every single blog post I create, across every website I own.

Back to the 5 themes and one last important point…

What they will do for you is as I said earlier, that they’ll pretty much handle 2 out of the 3 necessary SEO components I listed. You can certainly elect to choose another template option (like I said, there’s MANY), but just make sure the option you select, whether free or paid has the 2 of the 3 factors (simple and loads quickly) handled.

Now if you are just starting with a website and would like to handle this stuff quickly, I suggest creating your WP site through this program, which will give you access to these themes AND will also have fast hosting alongside it which will help it load quickly.

Also, the following program includes training on SEO alongside these sites you get.

Now I won’t lie to you, there’s always the directly, WordPress.com approach where you can make a free blog, but it doesn’t include the training and great hosting the other option does.

The other is also free to try.

What happens if I switch/change my theme? Will it affect my SEO rankings?

Temporarily yes.

It’s normal to want to test and switch the look of your site. If you have rankings on Google for good keywords and switch to another template, your rankings will very quickly go through a re-index and within a days or even days time go back to where they were.

Typically these switches should occur if the template you want to switch FROM has limitations and/or you want to do certain things on your site that your existing template doesn’t allow.

But for SEO like I said, it’s OK and you will get your rankings back quickly, so make the switch with confidence if you’re considering it.

I’ve been monitoring trends in SEO for many years. There’s consistently been 3 core things that have been shown to be most important year after year.

These 3 are:

• The ability for a site to produce content as often as possible.
• The ability for a site and person/s to produce high quality content.
• Focus on sharing the content on social media and emails to get shares, follows and backlinks.

If any website follows these 3 things, not only will they see massive expansion, rankings and traffic in 2019, but I would absolutely bet them good money that they will also see the same trends and success next year too.

Let me isolate and break down each of these things and explain what you need to do this year so each one of them be maximized and see the best results from:

Trend #1: The ability for a site to produce content as often as it can.

If you look at this particular one and see how it’s evolved, you will see that year after year, the quota for content on a site has grown. 

Let’s take websites in 2005 as a starting point:

You could very easily have made 1 page websites at the time, and ranked them on Google back then, and quickly. I certainly did this and even abused it (there was nothing illegal going on, it’s just how the ranking game worked back then).

If you knew how to rank sites back then, trust me, you could have made a lot of money, quite easily with SEO. And I certainly did that in my case.

But then let’s jump 1, 2, 5, 10 and even 14 years to 2019. What changed?

Well to rank a single page website for competitive keywords is nearly impossible now.

Only a site that has at least 30, 50 or even a 100 pages on it will do well today. Now notice how that trend that evolved:

SEO now requires FAR more work (content production) for a high ranking website.

This is one of the reasons why there has been a huge market growth and demand for freelance writers, because site owners who wish to get great rankings, need help for others to produce content for them so they can rank higher.

And that costs money, a lot sometimes.

Now this may have you wonder if today, in 2019, can a single person (with a small or no budget) make a large website and produce a lot of content all by themselves?

The answer is yes, but if you do not follow the 5 tips I’m going to give you, then you are likely not going to get anywhere with SEO, this year or any year:

Trend #2: Producing content is good, but it’s the quality of it that truly determines SEO success.

Let me ask you this…

If I were to tell you that 2 bloggers created websites on the same topic, and one had 30 blog posts, and the other a 100, but the person with the 30 was able to get more rankings, more traffic and more success from SEO. 

You would probably wonder how that’s possible. After all, we did just look at the first trend and I did clearly state that content production is one of the MAIN ones to focus on. 

Yet this one kind of contradicts it no? Well not quite.

Content production and quality goes hand and hand when it comes to rankings and if you look at how this has developed over the years, you will find that there is also a correlation going on…

Again, let’s look back at 2005 (And I am using that year because that’s when I began):

The same people who knew that 1 page websites were enough to rank high were able to make these same sites in hours if not minutes. And with only a few 100 words, they typically didn’t need to do much to get results.

Now the correlation you found during this time, was that people who produced content in mass amounts, also produced low quality content. You commonly found people abusing this easy way of doing SEO and selling their products, spamming people with cheap tactics and doing stuff that basically lowered the confidence of the reader (and search engine trust).

As the trend of writing more content to get better rankings rose, so did the need to improve the quality of it. Now quality can be interpreted subjectively by people, but the best way for me to describe it is…

Usually honesty on the part of the blogger who is writing mixed with good feedback from the reader is what determines the level of quality of content…

And it’s the blogger who creates more of this on their site that gets better feedback from Google, readers and thus rankings. Trust me, you will know a good blog when you land on it. You’ll see tons of comments, tons of likes, all of that and guess what? It’s all a sign of good, and great quality stuff.

This is why the person with the lesser content on their blog can outrank the one who has more of it. Now just as I did before, allow me to offer you 5 tips to maximize your success with this VERY important trend:

Trend #3: Expand your site’s reach with social media, but do it intelligently.

Social media does have an important role to play with SEO trends.

Stuff gets shared today more than ever before, so naturally if you do things like create great content and make it easily “sharable” on the main social media networks, you are likely to get people sharing it and thus driving more people to your site in the process. More on that here.

Now there is another side to this trend and that is that as important as social media is to your site, it’s truly secondary in my experience to the first 2 things. Unless you are some sort of celebrity and have great status online or followers, you will likely have to work a lot, build up your site and then engage in social media to get success from it.

Most unknown people and that would be just about 99% of people who do SEO, make a huge mistake when starting out on trying to market their site on social media TOO much, to people who frankly don’t care or know about them. 

The way to truly make this trend work best for you is to create a following from the incoming visitors to your site through SEO and then build a following from those visitors to then share your content with. That is how it’s supposed to be done.

You may notice that I have a Facebook fan page on this site (look to the right). I’m slowly building my following up this exact same way I’m talking about in this trend, but you will also notice that I don’t really care so much about this, because again, I have to tell you that focusing on trends 1 and 2 is where you will truly see success.

Think about it…

If you focus on the first 2 things above, and get to say 100 visitors a day, you can get 3,000 of them a month. Then by providing a way for those 3,000 visitors to follow you on various social media networks, you can stay in touch with them.

Suppose 10% of these 3,000 people (300) start following you on 2-3 networks. You can then share your content with them there and get them to like and share it. They may also email others about it and share it on their social networks, providing you with decent backlinks to your site.

Now consider the growth you can experience if you keep growing this following month after month. From 300 followers in month 1, you can keep getting more and more and get 1,000’s by the year’s end. Imagine the reach you’d have then through social media. It would be a lot.

But once again, this can be accomplished by getting to that point through the first 2 trends and then doing social media networking, not the other way around.

One of the ways I’ve made this work very well for me was that on another site I own, I refer people into a network where I teach them these same things I’m talking about here and over the years, my subscriber base has risen to over 30,000 followers (it’s not on any major social media channel, but it doesn’t matter, because these followers are pretty active for me):

This is how SEO evolves and it’s how it will continue to evolve.

Year after year, these 3 have been the ones that have stayed consistent in terms of how important they are and they have only grown. I am 100% certain that in 2019 these 3 things will and should be the main focus for any blogger and SEO person. 

And I am also 100% sure that if you focus on these 3 things correctly, that your blog and site will success way beyond 2019. In fact, when people try to tell me that SEO is dead, they just don’t understand the trends surrounding it, but it’s because I do (and shared them here with you) that my sites can and do grow.

And just to erase any doubt on whether what I’m saying here is theory, let me tell you that since 2005, I’ve made numerous sites that have gotten great rankings (my background in this), by following the same exact tips listed above for each trend. This is what I’ll be doing moving forward in 2019 and you should be too.

Of the many SEO rumors that swirl around, one of them is that buying expired domains helps SEO and the truth is, it doesn’t.

In fact, John Mu of Google itself is the one who basically put that myth to rest when he was asked about it on Twitter. Here was his response: 

Now that response isn’t exactly a subjective one, it’s pretty clear: It doesn’t help and here is the link to that message on Twitter.

But in this article, allow me to add reasons as to WHY this is the case. A long time ago, I believed buying expired domains had LITTLE value, and said it wasn’t worth it.

However, my reasoning was a little bit different and after seeing John’s response, I can add one more con to not buying them. But as for the details as to why, that’s what I’ll get into…

The SEO myth about expired domains explained…

The short explanation about this myth is that when a website is new and basically under the age of 6 months, it will be sandboxed for at least that period of time. 

During this period, it will not be ranking well and as I explain to people who are stuck in it, you can get out of the sandbox if you wait it out and do the proper things like these.

After the sandbox effect subsides, the domain name then becomes “aged” basically in that it will no longer fall under the trap of the sandbox and rankings will just come easy, and thus with this whole concept in place, comes the topic of buying aged domains…

People believed that if they buy a domain, age it to the post sandbox period or just let it stay around for many months and years, that it’s age will raise its SEO value and they’ll be able to sell it for a higher price. 

And the people they sell it to, will think they can just avoid all those months of “waiting” for the rankings to finally kick in and just start from a post sandbox point and get “immediate” SEO success.

Theoretically, with the whole sandbox topic in play here, this whole operation technically makes sense and I’d argue there may have been a point years ago where this could have been true, but after thinking about it and considering John’s answer, I can tell you why it detail why it won’t work…

Here’s detailed, simple reasons why buying an aged domain won’t help it’s SEO:

There are 2 scenarios in play here to explain why this is the case:

First, if we take someone who buys a domain, and doesn’t do anything with it for say a year (way past the sandbox period), then it’s still an empty site. It has at least a year on it and is technically aged, but without content on it, anyone who buys it will still have to start SEO from scratch. 

They will have to post new content, grow the site and this process will itself put them in the sandbox. In other words, it’ll be inevitable.

And second, if we take someone who buys a domain and actually builds a site on top of it, then it will rank well after 6 months, BUT if that person decides to JUST sell the domain itself, that’ll mean that they’ll have to basically erase/throw away all that content, meaning the page will be completely empty all over again, and that means, the website will lose it’s authority in Google and will have to start anew with whoever buys it.

I can tell you from experience that I have built websites from nothing, into authority pages and when I left them alone for a long period of time, the rankings DROPPED, all the way to the point that I would basically have to “re-climb” the ranking ladder all over again if I decided to try and build up the page.

Well if you take that experience, and go even further to the point where selling the page means erasing all it’s content, what do you think it’ll do to all the authority it’s accrued?

It’ll ERASE it and basically give it a blank SEO slate.

And after someone buys that page, guess what happens? Yep, they’ll have to restart the whole sandbox process again, so there’s really no winning with regards to this subject.

Here’s the only time that this method will work…

The only time that buying an aged domain holds merit is when that website has content on it, and that content is already ranking on search engines. Then when the person buys the website, they aren’t just buying the domain, but they are also buying the content on it and all the work that was put into growing it.

That operation will allow the next person who gets it to “take it from there” and continue growing the website, but the prices for these kinds of websites can be astronomically high.

However, there is an important MINUS to this method, and that is if the page has negative SEO history on it. If you intend to buy a website that is already built for you and is ranking high, make sure it’s SEO history is clean and not full of penalties.

So in conclusion…

If you’re going to buy a domain, I wouldn’t let it’s “age” be the reasofsn you get it. You’ll just overpay for it and then will have to start anew like anyone else would if they purchased a brand new one. And if the other major reason you wish to get it is because of it’s name, I still think you’re better off getting a brand new one, and you can easily get yourself a great domain name using these tips.

For me personally, I love getting brand new pages and building them up with the ranking strategies I know that work (here they are). It’s the safest approach, but it takes time. I have learned not to try and shortcut my way through the ranking process and that it’s worth doing it the right way.

Choosing a domain name that sounds awesome and is also great for SEO is tough, mainly because of all the myths you may have heard. So how do you decide?

Well, here’s a rule regarding picking out domain names (DN) I’ve been following for years:

I want to leave the comments section open for this, because I get a lot of questions from people who are undecided on what DN to pick, so if you’re still undecided after reading this whole article, let me know what ideas you are considering and I’ll help you make the choice.

That being said…

Here’s 5 rumors/myths about domain names (DN) and SEO we need to clear up:

1) I have to choose an EMD (Exact match domain).

In case this is the first time you’ve heard of an EMD, the basic premise of it is that you find a keyword with a large search volume, then make a DN that is literally that same keyword. For example:

As a result, it is believed that EMD’s rank higher on search engines, because the DN of the site matches a highly targeted keyword, so it gets extra weight for SEO.

Is this true?

Not exactly. Many years ago, YES, this was a real thing that indeed had positive SEO results for those who practiced it. But no longer. Let me explain why:

The SEO value a website has comes down to 100’s of different things, and it’s DN is honestly a minuscule part. It is so minuscule that… 

If we took 2 people, who each made 1 site on the same subject, both targeted the same keyword, but one chose the EMD approach, while the other, chose something different, such as my approach, then in the beginning, the person with the EMD would rank higher, and that’s solely based on the fact that at first, both sites would be blank essentially, with no content on them and when Google would look at both sites, and see that they are blank, they’d give the EMD one a higher position over the other site because at least it has 1 of the many ranking factors.

But as soon as the person without the EMD starts adding content to his site and targets the same keyword, he will outrank the EMD site quite easily, so what I’m going back to is the main point about how little EMD’s matter in the long run.

So don’t worry about that awesome keyword you found with high search volumes, you can name your site pretty much anything, then just write an article on the site, with the meta title being that awesome keyword you found and you will get ranked for that, that’s really it. 

In short, in my professional experience, don’t go the EMD route UNLESS all of the content and pages you write on the site are related to the DN. For example:

2) I have to buy an expired domain.

This is also a rumor with some merit to it, but there’s so little of it that there are far more cons to going this route. In short, this doesn’t work for SEO (reasons explained here).

The idea behind it is that domains overtime accrue favor ability from Google and if that domain gets sold and the buyer starts writing content on it, it will already have the SEO weight behind it to rank faster and higher.

That and the fact that many good sounding, and even brandable DN often get bought up and basically “ransomed” to the highest bidder makes them favorable too. 

So is this true?

While in my opinion, there used to be truth to an expired domain holding higher SEO value than a new, fresh one, there are many domains which are sold by people that have a bad history with Google, such as perhaps, it was engaged in negative SEO and then, with that red mark, they are put up for sale without disclosing this, so the next buyer gets a tainted site basically, without knowing it.

My whole position on this is that it’s not worth worrying about buying that “perfect DN” or aged one, because it is almost impossible to know what was going on with it before you purchased it, and this SEO myth has been debunked as well.

I take the safe route here and advise not doing this.

3) I need to get a .com.

As website creation is growing in numbers, so too is the number of people buying up DN and it increasing at such a rapid pace that more and more “gTLD’s” are being released, which are basically domain extensions, beyond just .com’s. Here is an article on gTLDs from Wikipedia.

I will be completely honest here in saying that if you take 2 sites with the same exact subject, but one has a .com and the other has something unusual such as a .pro, that even something as uncommon as a .pro can outrank the .com if the content quality is of higher value on the .pro site than it is on the .com site.

Google itself has also released it’s official position on gTLD’s that you can read about here and they basically say the same thing.

However, while there is basically no SEO points awarded to a gTLD/a site’s extension, I will say that the content quality is what truly defines the site’s success for SEO, so while the message you could take from this is that you can go crazy and pick out whatever extension you want (it’s the right interpretation), my habit and advice would still be to chase the more known extensions, starting with a .com and then working your way down the extension ladder, with the next ones being a .net and then a .org.

I’m not a fan of the .pro, .guru or any other unknown or unpopular gTLD’s. As of this time, I would never make a site with those extensions, nor recommend that a client I am doing SEO work for would either, and that is because the people who view the site still inherently see the value a .com over the other, unknown extensions. 

If you can’t get that awesome site title, be open minded enough to go for a completely different name. Do not waste too much time infatuated with one DN and nothing else, you can rank any site, for any keyword in the end, regardless of the DN, remember that.

4) I need it to be brandable. 

The more serious you are about building a website for business purposes, even if it is a blog, the more brandable I would recommend you make your domain and also more simple sounding. What I mean by brandable is:

My website’s name, HelpingHandSEO.com is an example of these 4 principals in action.

If you can grow a website to a point where people can easily remember it’s name, they will eventually Google it and tell others about it, which will cause them to Google it too.

Eventually, you can create a brand out of the site, by having masses remember it and this can literally cause your site’s name to become a keyword. This is actually one of the goals I am aiming for with mine.

And ironically, that site may eventually become an EMD itself (because it’ll become a popular keyword on Google), but it’ll sound great, it’ll be original and it’ll be yours, which is a whole different dynamic that’s better. A person I know who sells SEO services, created a company that grew so much that people actually look for the company name on Google a lot.

Note: If you are not building your own brand, I would not recommend you pick a website name that uses another company’s brand name as it’s domain. This MAY cause trademark issues (it doesn’t often happen) and I would avoid that problem altogether by just picking something unique.

5) It needs to use my name.

You can go 50/50 here. If you are not famous or don’t have a large social media following or large following at all, then I would not do this. You first need to create a following, and lots of people need to know you and what you are all about before you create a DN that is literally your name.

Celebrities can do this, but if you aren’t one, I wouldn’t do it, especially if your name is hard to remember, go the other route first (with the 4 principals above), create a following, then decide if you want to start a new site, with your name being in the domain.

For example…

My full name is Vitaliy Gershfeld. I’m likely NOT going to make a DN anytime soon with my full name being that, because let’s be honest, who is going to remember that name, let alone how to spell it?

I’d rather build up my brand and my name THROUGH the website I currently run here (It’s so much easier to remember no?), and that will provide a better way for people to recognize it, as well as remember me, and who knows, perhaps sooner or later, if a big enough following pops up, I may just end up making a new DN with my name in it.

Ok, so when I’m ready, where should I buy my domain?

There’s tons of domain registrars to choose from but lately (actually for a few years), I’ve been buying mine from Wealthy Affiliate, as their deals are best.

Here is the official page and explanation of the benefits their registrar holds over the other places and like I said, nowadays, I buy all of my sites through them.

First you’d need to sign up with them for free, then you’d get the option to buy the site with all the benefits. The only other registrar I’ve dealt with before WA was GoDaddy.com, no longer though.