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Tips - SEO & Social Media Marketing

Is There Still Money to be made in Exact Match Domains?

Today I have a ‘Guest Post’ from Penny Lewis that I think will be of interest to many online marketers, enjoy!

For as long as there has been an internet to exploit, people have been exploiting it. From those dark corners where nobody ever goes, to the more family-friendly end of the spectrum. Wherever you are on the web you can bet there’ll be someone behind the scenes who is monetizing it. As any budding SEO specialists will tell you, there’s always been some money to be made in optimising a page for a specific search term and peppering it with Adsense blocks. Sometimes, these sites can make thousands per month, other times they can make absolutely nothing. Call it niche marketing, micro niche blogging, or whatever you’d like, the question remains: is there still money to be made in this way, and more particularly in EMD (Exact Match Domain) sites?

A Matter of Distinction

So what’s the main difference between an EMD site and a regular blog or website? Well, simply put, an EMD site is dedicated to one particular keyword. The SEO, or whoever is running the site, will do some fairly thorough keyword research, find a niche that has low competition but a high search volume (and yes, this can take hours on end), then check that it has an EMD available. If so, they’ll snap it up and build a whole site around it. Ever seen a site on the web when you’re searching for something that’s plastered in ads and oddly targeted? That’s probably an EMD site. For example, if you wanted to find the best skincare product for acne, you might find a site called bestskincareproductforacne.com, filled with posts and articles on that very theme. The endgame of these sites is to have you click on the ads. Some are specifically designed to ‘confuse’ the visitor into clicking, by disguising the ads as links or other nefarious practices.

Are EMDs a Licence to Print Money?

When the web was very young, and the web-going pubic were naïve, EMDs would have made millions is Adsense revenue. Nowadays however, it’s a slightly different ballgame. Not only are web users getting a little wiser to such things, but the competition for practically every keyword combination is ramping up. So not only is it hard to get people to click on ads once they’re on one of these EMD sites, it’s also very difficult to find a niche which can bring in enough organic traffic to make the whole venture worthwhile. Remember that these sites can’t just be knocked together in an hour, it takes time and effort to create index-worthy content. Most EMDs these days are filled with cheap content that reads terribly, and it shows. That’s dilution of the web, and it’s not a good thing at all.

It’s not all Bad News

This may all sound like bad-mouthing of EMD projects, but that’s not necessarily the case. Yes, some of these sites are designed to draw in organic traffic simply to click ads. They serve no real purpose and offer no real answers. These sites are the ones that give niche marketing a bad name. However, there are a great many exact match domain sites out there that have become ‘authority’ sites. These are the other side of the coin; yes, they will have ads to generate income, but they also have valuable content written by people that actually know what they’re talking about. It’s the simple difference between a spam site and an informational one.

What it Boils Down to

So, the bottom line is that yes, there is still some money to be made in exact match domain websites; however any SEO who is planning to take on such a project will need to remember the golden rule: content is king. That means that if you’re planning on covering a site in ads, you need to have some real content to back it up. There are plenty of ways to get good content on a site – and sometimes writers will even provide it for free (think backlinks) – but that’s a discussion for another time. For now, don’t be tempted to fill the web with even more spam; if you want to make money with Adsense, do it the right way and make the web a better place for all of us.

Penny Lewis is a professional freelance writer and researcher who has worked in all manner of fields from promotional work with a hyper-luxurious furniture company to news pieces for a political blog. She has interests across all areas but has a strong background in online marketing and branding. 

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The Case for Building Backlinks

If you don’t have links pointing to your website, Google will not take your site seriously. PERIOD!  In other words, if no other website on the Internet sees value in linking to your site, Google will virtually ignore you.

When Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded Google in 1998, the core metric used to establish the value of a website were the number of links pointing to it.  Their theory was simply that links were essentially votes for a site’s significance.  If you had 100 websites dealing with blue widgets, the site with the most links had to be the best site about blue widgets.

Remember, this is an automated process; a software robot (or spider) crawls a web page and follows every link emanating from that page. There is no human interaction, no site judging panel that decides which blue widget site is the best. The Google algorithm ranks a site’s value using hundreds of parameters that include everything from compliant HTML, the age of the domain, proper SEO, external links and dozens of other weighted factors.

Links pointing to your website are still extremely important.  In fact, it is rumored that although Google provides a method for site submission, they prefer to discover your website by following a link from another site.  Links are very cheap insurance that contribute to your ranking in search results.

How to get quality backlinks

To obtain links by hand is a grueling, time consuming process. To get links via an automated submission tool is no longer effective and in some instances can actually hamper your efforts. Face it, you need backlinks and you need a reliable process to achieve good results. If you are looking for a cost-effective way of building quality backlinks, watch this video.

If you have read my book or attended one of my seminars you already know how important links are for improving search results and generating traffic. Find out what hundreds one-way links can do for your website?

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Content or links – which comes first?

A reader made a comment on a previous post and asked some great questions that I’m sure many of you have, so I thought I’d answer his questions in this post.  Bob wrote…

What do you think of the Bluehost deals for SEO? I just signed up for their $99/month service for one keyword. They will put a 4 page wordpress site up for me and start creating links to it. They do 3 keywords for $199.

I’m reading SEO for Dummies now and may get your ebook as well. Am I better off writing my own keyword-rich content (or hiring freelancers to do it on Fiverr, iFreelance,etc) and learning to do links myself. I have plenty of time and little money. Thanks,

Bob, you asked some excellent questions and believe it or not, you’re already doing some ‘off-site’ SEO by asking your question here and including a link to your site in the comment form.

You said that you have “plenty of time and little money”, which is a common problem many of us share. If that is the case, spending $99 or $199 per month for links is not a good idea…yet.  Let me explain…

In the most recent Google algorithm update a few months ago, they targeted sites that had very little content, or redundant content. Hundreds of thousands of websites virtually disappeared from the Google index, or found themselves on page 98,000.

We need to remember that Google’s goal is to provide what it believes are the best results for a particular search query. A website with little or no content will not rank well regardless of the number or quality of links pointing to it. So, that should answer your question about Bluehost’s linking deal.

At the risk of shameless self-promotion, Bob, I would strongly encourage you to get a copy of my book before you start paying for links or any other SEO services. In my book, I discuss basic page design and critical SEO factors that you need to include, and I hate to tell you that your site is not scoring well at this moment.

‘Local Search’ is one of Google top initiatives and the only piece of information on your page is a phone number. Unfortunately, that phone number is part of a graphic and Google can’t see that your phone number is area code 650.

You have two images on the page and your primary logo image is named, “he_logo.jpg”. Renaming that image to something such as, “san_mateo_electric.jpg” would give Google more information to index.

The only text on your entire page is www.HillsboroughElectric.com and that doesn’t give Google enough information to display your site in results for any search query.

As to creating content for your website, I would encourage you to do this personally before you consider outsourcing.  Nobody knows your business or industry as well as you, so share that information on your site.

Once you feel that you have the basics covered, feel free to outsource, but know that you will need to rewrite almost everything you get from such a source. With the exception of some excellent talent in the Philippines, most outsource firms employ people where English is a second language and most articles will read that way.

Bob, you’re on the right track, but you need to do things in the proper order. You don’t want links before you have some content posted. In fact, you really don’t want to do anything proactively until your site can stand on its own explaining who you are, what you do and where you’re located.

My book, the SEO & Social Media Marketing Guide was written with people like you in mind. People who know they need a website, but can’t afford to hire a professional firm and are not sure where to start or what to do. This is why I offer a “No questions asked guarantee!”  If my book doesn’t meet your expectations – get your money back.  Just one idea could make you thousands!  But, I want you to take 60 days to review my book and decide if this information isn’t worth much more than the cover price.  With no risk, you have nothing to lose!

Best of luck to you, my friend and thanks for taking the time to comment on this blog.

PS: I love the look of your site so far and the pic, now you need to feed Google with a bunch of keyword-rich text.

PPS: If you need links, how about 650 one-way links…see this.

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Does Twitter drive traffic to a website?

Let’s say you have a website that is highly focused on a particular product, service or geographic area. You may be a house painter, a boutique retailer, own a restaurant, barber shop, lawn service or any business catering to a local clientele.

Reluctantly you are now trying to utilize Twitter and Facebook to reach new customers. Hey, you’ve been told that you must do this or face being left behind. You don’t know who or what to believe, but you know that you can’t sit back and do nothing.  You’ve seen traffic to your website decline and you’re hoping that this Twitter and Facebook involvement will stop the bleeding.

Anyone who has attempted to create a Facebook ‘Page’ for their business will admit that Facebook’s instructions are confusing and not the least bit intuitive. Twitter on the other hand, is so blatantly easy to set up and configure that you think you must be missing something – nothing can be this easy, can it?

We’ll focus on Twitter in this article and cover Facebook in an upcoming post. Once you have opened a Twitter account and configured your profile and tweaked your layout, you’re ready to start tweeting and following people. And this is where Twitter requires some attention.

There are scores of programs and online services available to help you manage your Twitter account and you will need some of these to save time and make the right decisions. Just searching for the right people to follow (and accepting the right friends) is a chore.

You operate a local business, there is no reason to follow or become friends with a bicycle shop in Taiwan or a pizza shop in Toledo, and you will get requests to follow such companies. Ideally, you want to find people to follow who are in your geographic area. The whole idea is to network with potential prospects and existing customers.

When you begin to accumulate followers there is a tendency to follow-back anyone who follows you. I mean, it’s only the polite thing to do, right?  Wrong. Stick to the plan and only follow local people who will add value to your network and hopefully become a customer or source of new business.  If you don’t do this, a few months down the road you’ll find yourself with hundreds or thousands of followers that offer no value to your business.

I use a program called SocialOomph to manage my personal accounts and clients’ accounts. SocialOomph will let you schedule Tweets to be published at a later date. Better still, it will let you schedule any tweet to recur 1 day, 3 days, 1 month, etc. The beauty of this is that if you created 20, 40 or 100 tweets they could all be appearing in your feed as you specify. This is handy way of keeping activity in your account while you tend to your business.

SocialOomph will let you automatically follow people who follow you and unfollow those who unfollow you and you can manually approve new followers. You’ll receive daily reports and discover a host of other features that make managing your Twitter account painless.

tl 468 60 01 Does Twitter drive traffic to a website?

So, the big question everyone inevitably asks… Does Twitter drive traffic to a website? The short answer is yes.  The longer answer is don’t expect to see an uptick in traffic three days after you open your Twitter account. Like any networking experience, it takes time for people to get to know you or trust you.  With Twitter, it takes time before anyone may even see one of your tweets.

In my case, I sell a digital book; a product that can be downloaded immediately. To my knowledge, I did not sell any books that I could attribute to Twitter during my first month.  On the other hand, I may have sold 50 books, but I had no proof that Twitter was responsible for linking people to my website.

Over time I have heard from people on Twitter who have sent me a ‘Direct Message’ or Tweeted about my book. People have told me they bought the book after reading my tweets.

Twitter works, but like any other promotional or marketing effort, it will demand your attention and your time to bear fruit.  So, if you derived any benefit from this post, please do me a favor and Tweet about it…click the social icon below and share this with your friends.  Thanks!

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