Development/SEO | Domain Name News, Domaining Tips and Tricks by ChefPatrick.com

Video For SEO

Posted on 11 April 2009

I asked fellow blogger Morgan Linton of DomainVestors.tv to write a guest post for me. Morgan gets it, he realizes the importance of video for SEO. He gets it so much that he recently converted his standard text blog to 100% video. If you are not familiar with Morgan check him out at DomainVestors.tv.

For years SEO-experts have been writing keyword-rich content with carefully placed anchor-text to help drive their sites to the top of the search engines. In the early days of the Internet Yahoo was the search engine of choice. Well, it’s 2009 and Google is king of the pack, forget King, Google is the almighty ruler of search. With a large majority of the search engine market Google is the search engine to optimize for.

It should come as no surprise then that when Google makes major changes to their algorithm, sites that were once on page one could find themselves on the dreaded page two, or worse. As the Domaining world has made a clear shift from parking to development many Domainers have been putting-on their SEO hat for the first time. Unfortunately when you search for SEO tips online most sites will only talk about optimizing keywords and providing solid anchor text. This is still important, but more factors are coming-into play now that are dramatically changing how your site will rank with Google.
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Google Page Rank Updated

Posted on 02 April 2009

Check your page rank!!!

I am pleased to say that ChefPatrick.com went from a PR3 to PR4. Thank you to my readers and everyone who has linked back to me.

Sorry to those of you who may have lost page rank. Stay motivated and update your sites.

Google updating may not be 100% completed, check it again in 24 hours just to be safe.

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Free Traffic

Posted on 10 March 2009

Here are some 100% free traffic methods to help get your site off the ground.

Article Submission
Create and submit an article pertaining to your industry. In the article you will be able to link back to your site for more information. Top three sites for this would be eZineAricles.com, GoArticles.com and ArticleDashboard.com.

Blog Comments
Find a popular blog in your niche and submit comments. Not just any comments though, make sure to contribute to the conversation. If you don’t they will be ignored and possibly not approved.

Guest Post
Once you’ve found the blogs in your niche ask if you can create an article and have it published with a link or two to your site. I for one am more than willing to let a person contribute as long as it make sense and goes along with my topic.

SEO
Optimize your website by editing its content and HTML coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines. This will come with time. The most important thing to remember is content quality is key.

Video
This one is really a hot item right now. It is believed that Google will be using some video guidelines in future ranking algorithms. This is a must in today’s world, not just for the SEO implications but the You Tube factor. People are using You Tube more than ever to search topics of interest.

My Favorite Four

Forums
Find the forums within your niche. Visit and post comments often. Make sure your signature reflects your website address.

Link Exchange
Reach out to the other blogs and sites in your niche. Send them an email asking to swap links. I suggest offering a location on your main page, this will give them the incentive to agree.

RSS Feed Sites
I’m not talking about the standard sign up for my RSS button. I’m talking about feed sites like AllTop.com and Domaining.com. Find these sites and ask if they are willing to use your feed in their headlines. Make sure to create a catchy headline so viewers will want to click on your article.

Twitter – Social Marketing
I cannot really speak for social marketing as a whole, I can only speak for Twitter. Twitter has brought hundreds of visitors to my site. This method is somewhat time consuming if you are going to be an active member. I personally spend at least an hour or two on Twitter every day.

If I am missing any please feel free to post a comment and I will make sure to include in the article.

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WordPress, Not Just For Blogs

Posted on 05 March 2009

Today I have a guest post from one of my readers. Joel Ohman runs the premium domain tools membership site DomainSuperstar.com along with John G. and is currently working to release domain development tutorial videos and custom website development services for their premium members.

Ask almost any webmaster, “Who is the undisputed king of blogging software?” and they will most likely reply that WordPress is, without a doubt, the preeminent choice for blogging software. However, if you ask the question, “What is the best piece of software to use as a CMS (Content Management System) for running a website?” then you will undoubtedly get a plethora of different responses that range from Joomla to Drupal to custom coding to hundreds of other different answers.

Many webmasters sing high praises for the fact that WordPress is stable, open source (read: FREE), easy to use, supports multiple users, supports bulk site management, has a wide variety of themes and plugins available to use, and is a snap to install and upgrade. This being said, many people are not clued into the power of WordPress as a platform or CMS for a full scale website.

Here is what you need to know about using WordPress as a robust solution for creating and managing your websites.

Choose the Right Host for WordPress

While you can certainly download and install WordPress onto any domain hosted on any hosting package you like it will make things a lot easier for you if you choose a host that offers cPanel. cPanel is a website control panel software application that comes free with many hosts (Chef Patrick’s favorites, HostGator). The beauty of cPanel is that you can install WordPress on your domain with just a couple of clicks.

Choose the Right Theme for Wordpress

Ok, so you have chosen the right host and you have installed WordPress onto your domain. Now you are probably thinking, “Wow, my site definitely looks like a blog and not like a website”. You will think this at first because the way that WordPress manages the appearance of your site is by uploading and activating different templates called WordPress themes.

The default WordPress theme looks very much like a standard blog. You can view the default WordPress theme that comes standard with every installation of WordPress by visiting the WordPress Widgets blog. While this theme may be fine for a very plain looking blog, if you want to use WordPress and make it look like a professional website then you will need to upload and activate a new theme.

There are many different WordPress themes that you can download for free but if you really want to have a nice looking site then you will probably want to buy a premium theme that is designed specifically to look like a regular website from a place like Studio Press, WooThemes, WP Remix, or any number of other WordPress theme designers. In fact, the domain name tools website that I run uses a Studio Press WordPress theme and looks very much like a real e commerce website rather than a blog.

Choose the Right Plugins for WordPress

As I mentioned earlier one of the huge advantages to creating a site based on the WordPress platform is that there is an absolutely enormous selection of plugins (addons) that you can incorporate into WordPress with no real knowledge of HTML, PHP, or any other type of coding language. You can literally think of almost anything that you want WordPress to be capable of doing for your website and chances are someone has already created a plugin (probably for free) that will do just what you want.

Do you want to have a sitemap that automatically creates itself? Do you want to have an easy to use and easy to set up contact form? Do you want to make it easy to incorporate solid SEO practices on your site? Do you want to incorporate an auto-responder onto your site easily? You can do all of these things and a thousand more just by downloading and activating the right WordPress plugin.

If you can dream it up then you can most likely find it already created for you simply by entering in a phrase describing what you want followed by “WordPress plugin” into Google.

Michael Fortin has a good list of WordPress plugins that he uses on his high traffic internet marketing/copyrighting blog.

Popular Websites Using Wordpress as a CMS

Still aren’t convinced of the power of WordPress for creating and managing your websites? Rubiqube.com has 2 different lists of 10 great website designs using WordPress as a CMS that you can view here and here.

Managing Multiple Websites with WordPress

It is a cinch to manage multiple websites with WordPress both using WordPress MU (Multi User) and by taking advantage of the numerous plugins that have been created for just this purpose. I cover some of the more popular plugins and software applications that can be used in the the scaling your web development efforts of the post, “Do You Make These 7 Mistakes When You Develop Your Domains?“.

Build a Professional Website with WordPress Today and See for Yourself!

You can quite literally have a very professional looking website online and live for the world to see in under an hour with WordPress. Whether you own one domain or thousands of domains; give WordPress a try when you set out to develop your next full scale professional website!

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Don’t Let Them Leave

Posted on 03 March 2009

You have spent a countless amount of hours working on your site and the last thing you want to do is steer visitors away. Make sure that all links, ads and images leading away from your site open in a new window. By doing this it makes the site visitors come back and have to consciously make the decision to leave your site.

Why I like this personally as a reader…
When I go to a site and click on a link that opens up on the same page instead of in a new window I, more often than not, wind up not going back to the original site I started at. This will especially happen if I get hooked into what I’m reading about and have to click through several pages. When I’m done reading the extra pages I normally wind up closing out the window. If I remember to, I will type in the original site address and start over. Other times I just don’t feel like going through the hassle of starting over, so I don’t. This means the original site I started out at just lost me – not forever, but for that time.

When I go to a site that allows me to click on a link that opens up a separate window, I always get back to the original site. The original site is left open. You only have to close out the extra window. I go right back to what I was originally doing because it’s still right there in my face.

Below are two very popular services that I use. Both services create links that bring visitors to their sites. Well, that’s not what I want. I don’t want my visitors to leave. Here are examples of how I have made these services work for what I want.

Vimeo.com
I use Vimeo to showcase my videos. They offer both free and paid accounts. The paid account which is $59.95 per year, allows me to remove their branding. Besides the removal of their logo the paid account allows me to turn off the options for comments and favorites, both of which would bring my visitors to their site.

Vimeo has a great widget that would allow me to showcase my videos with tiny thumbnails on my blog. Although it’s a great feature it has a flaw, it would take my visitors away from my site. Instead I have created something similar by adding thumbnail images of my videos in the middle of my site. I then take those images and link each one to the appropriate blog post.

Flickr.com
To showcase my pictures I use Flickr. There are tons and tons of widgets/plug-ins for Flickr. If I would have used the plug-in that they provided it would have brought my visitors to their site to view my images. Instead I did a lot of research and found a plug-in that will embed all of the images on my site. Here is that link. Of course it opens in a new window.

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