Changing your domain name for seo (search engine optimisation) reasons

I receieved this email question today from the owner of a website called SIAuk:

We have also had a discussion about a re-brand of SIAuk, just wondered what you thought if we were to change the title to perhaps more keyword orientated? Something along the lines of SIAuk Security Vacancies or something? If this would improve our ranking in any way? If you have any thoughts on the above that would be welcome! Thanks,

I thought that this was a question that you might find interesting, so here is the answer:

If you are going to do it, do it now. Once a website goes live, the web address that it is attached to starts to build up history. The longer a web address has been live, the better that the web site attached to that web address ranks in the engine. Think of it like building up a reputation. It takes time to build up rep, and if you change your name, you loose the associated reputation. Currently your site if fairly new anyway, so you wouldn't loose a large ammount if you re branded, especially if you correctly 301 forward to old domain and internal pages across.

You do actually have one major thing to gain by rebranding. You can buy a domain that relects your main search term and thus more easily rank for it. For example, if you do a search for security vaccancies.
As you can see, the site in first place is called www.securityvacancies.com/ They rank more easily for this because it is their name.

This change could give you a big boost - if you pick the correct domain. If you wanted an SEO eye when choosing your domain, I would be happy to include this extra research and work into the £600 onsite optimisation SEO Audit should you go ahead with it. I hope that helps - call / email me if it doesn't.

Big mouth media penalised by google!

I don't know why yet, but it really does seem like google has de indexed big mouth media homepage. This is big news because they were in the first place for the phrase 'Search engine optimisation' which is pretty much the holy grail of SEO. If your in first place for that you have a good case to claim to be the best.

But why would google do this. Is it a declaration of war agasint all SEO? I think I'll give it a day before panicing.

Different Titletags? Balck Hat SEO? No, it is the power of a DMOZ entry!

So I found a post on Sitepoint, where someone had discovered this anomaly in the search results.
If you search for "on demand guitar lessons" you find a reuslt that looks like this (please do try it for yourself):



However, if you do a search for "best guitar school" you get the same website come up, but with a completely different title tag! It looks like this:



"Wait a minute!" I hear you say, thats a different title tag! How are they doing that? Well, I can tell you now that it is really simple, it is the dmoz entry. The title "personal guitar school" has been dynamically pulled from their DMOZ entry which had that as the anchor text.

So how is this useful? Well is shows us how great it would be to have a DMOZ entry - however that remains someone redundant information as it is still near impossible to get one these days. So dispite the cleverness of this - it is completely useless!

LinkEyes: A New Link Building Tool To Help You Optimise Websites

I’ve just discovered a new Link Building tool called LinkEyes. When I stumbled on the web application’s home page, with a text field agape, inviting me to type something in, I couldn’t resist succumbing. ‘Make a simple search now’, the web application said, enticingly. I tried jazz fusion, and it immediately returned a list of directories which did, indeed, specialise in the said version of jazz. I was soon reassured that the tool wasn’t going to be limited to finding directories. I was also reassured that it wouldn’t be limited to just finding!


Because LinkEyes runs from my browser, there was nothing to install and I was off the ground with my link development in minutes.


I discovered that I was able to upgrade from the free ‘Lite’ version to a ‘professional version’ (still free for a limited period) which gave me access to more search phases (such as Article Banks, Resources and Local Directories) and, most importantly, a plethora of features for all my link development tasks. Before long, I was saving my link prospects into projects, composing link requests and sending them off, filling out forms, exporting projects and checking link statuses. When requesting links, it was easy to include data which I had saved earlier and pick from a set of personalised templates, so I didn’t have to write each request from scratch. At the same time, I wasn’t spamming my link prospects, because I had the opportunity to edit each request to suit. I also liked the advanced search which enabled me to focus on just UK sites and add more precision to my searches. I didn't go out there to try and find a new link building research manager, but it seems that is what I've found!


The whole experience was very ethical because, unlike some tools, I felt I was in the driving seat. I was controlling my search, scrutinising my link prospects’ sites and taking care over the link requests. On occasion, I had to consult the on-line help to guide me along, but mostly the tool was intuitive to use.


I am confident that the links I am establishing will push my site up the rankings because the links I used to find were effective in this respect, and LinkEyes finds links which are at least as good, and it makes it easier and quicker at the same time.

PVC Banner Stands - a seasonal change in traffic

Using analytics well and tracking traffic is a key part of any good optimisation campain. It is all very well covering all your bases - making sure that the onsite optimisation is good, that all the keywords are in the correct places, that the site is fully readable and relevent for the correct terms. Making sure that the page is clear about its content is so impartant. If you have a page about pvc banners, make sure that it appears to both the human eye and the search engines robots as being about pvc banners. This does two things. It will help the search engines rank it for the correct term so that people can find it. When people do find it, it will help them to become customers buy increasing the conversion rate through clarity.

So you rank well now no your chosen search term. Are you keeping an eye on the tracking however? You are working towards position within the search engines, that is your job. Never forget though that ultimately what will make the client happy is traffic. That is really what they are after - they want customers. Ranking is a means to an end. So keeping an eye on your tracking to see what is and what isn't working is very important in the long term to ensure that you are doing a good job in the bigger picture.

So when there is a drop in traffic should you be concerned? Of course you should be! It the customers stop coming, the business that is paying you will fail. However, sometimes a drop in traffic is normal. Most things have some level of seasonal variation. No matter what type of banner stands you are selling, you are always going to be busier in the run up to exhibition season, and less busy following this. There will always be a slump. This is not something to panic about, but simply something to be aware of.

Google as part of their free traffic estimator now offer a seasonal tracking estimator. It will allow you to see the general trend in traffic and searches per the search term over the previous year. If you are at all worried or unsure it is worth having a look at this. Just remember, watch your traffic. If it drops off and it is not to do with seasonal change, then you may want to find out the cause as soon as possible - before your business goes under.

Link Building - the difficulty of building links in the modern world

A core part of any search engine optimisation campaign is link building. Every website will need links in order to rank well, and they will need them at both a certain quality level and also a certain quantity. For example, if you are running a cosmetic clinic, you may well be needing lots of links with the words hair loss in order to help you bring customers into your clinic. So how do you find decent links through the internet?

Well this is the real question. If you have time to find legitimate websites, contact each of them individually, respond to those that do respond, then cut a deal that they are happy with (either an advert, or a trade or just pay them for the link), then brilliant. This is a long drawn out process however, and the time it takes to do this means that actually by the point that you have your link, it has "cost" you a massive amount in time to get that link - far more than just buying a directory entry from BOTW or joeant.

So then we move logically away from link finding to buying directory links. So which directorys links is it worth buying? So you purchase the first really legitimate 10 links on the list, and then you find that you are fast running out of directory entrys that you can buy that are actually trusted. It's all very well having money to spend, but how do you spend it well? Which directories out of the hundreds out there are actually worth getting. You quickly find that many of them have been devalued. So instead you decide to swap links.

You start trading links. Thats when you realise that reciprocal linking is not only really easy to trace, but is now ignored by google. So doing a direct link swap does nothing at all. So you go to blog posts.

That's when you stumble accross an article about pay per post, the blog post company that went from having an empire to having nothing when google descovered their blog network, and reduced to page rank of every single blog in their entire network to nothing, destroying their business.

So what do you do? If you can find a trustworthy company offering link building services then all well and good, your problems are solved; but trying to navigate the minefield that is link building in the modern world is tough. More than that, it is just so difficult to know what will work and what won't.

Is a sub domains better than a new domain?

I was asked this question at work today by a company called brammer, I thought it was a interesting question. I spoke to an seo company who were very helpful, but they made me promise to put a link out to them with the anchor text seo company london. They are legitimate, they are based in London and they are an SEO company! Besides, they gave me good advice.

Here is my opinion following research and their help!

The question of subdomains:

The search engines say that they treat any subdomain of a website as a domain in its own right. They say that they give no extra credence or value to that domain, and it functions exactly the same as if you bought a new domain and started with that.

In our experience we have found this to be fairly accurate - in some situations we have found that the engines index new domains faster than subdomains, though we haven't experimented with this under test conditions yet so this is instinct not fact.

What you would be loosing
Should you decide to amalgamate all of your country based websites into the brammer.biz website within subdomains, what you would be loosing is the history and the trust that the local websites have already built up. For example, the brammer.co.uk site was first indexed on the 28th November 1999, it has close to ten years of history behind it which helps its rankings within the engines. Some of the qudos would be transferred if you forward correctly, however, in our experience you always loose out in the transfer.

What you might gain

Your reasons for amalgamating may have fair reaching business effects that have nothing to do with the search engines that I can't see because I'm not running your business. Perhaps you will save money on hosting and maintenance, and nothing is unfixable, you can always rebuild trust, build links back up again and re rank your pages for the terms that you are trying to appear for. You will loose time on it though.

A note on local relevance

There is an additional note I must mention, which is that a www.somthing.de site will be seen as having more relevance when searched for within a German search engine such as www.google.de , so on and so forth.