Domainvestors.tv SEO Week: Day 4

Since I missed yesterday I will be making it up by writing Domainvestors.tv SEO Week: Day 5 tomorrow so you’ll still get a full five days of SEO tips. In today’s lesson I’m going to talk about a very simple concept, but one that many people ignore – page attributes. So what do I mean by “Page Attributes”? What I am talking about here is the title of each page within your site as well as the name of each internal page within your site.

Search engines like Google and Yahoo use what is contained within the <title> tag on a page to determine which keywords the domain most closely identifies itself with. This means that you’ll want to use your top one or two keywords in your title to rank well for those particular keywords. This makes a lot of sense when you look at search results in many major search engines – what shows-up at the top of each search entry when you enter a query? The title of the page! Take a look at the example below when I search for Domainvestors on Google:

As you can see an article I wrote for helium is ranked #2 in Google. You can see the title tag there clear as day with the words domain flipping in bold. You can also see my book as the fourth entry with both domain flipping and flip domain highlighted in bold. These are both bold because Google knows that if I’m searching for “domain flipping” – “flip domain” is also closely related keyword pair and thus having these two keyword pairs in my title is helping my rankings here.

The other very important page attribute to pay attention to is the name of your internal pages. Usually the homepage of your site will be called index.html and it’s name will not be visible in the URL. The internal pages of your site will display in the URL and will also be used by search engines to determine how relevant the content on your page is to the what a user is searching for. Suppose you have a website about Sports. Having an internal page about baseball that you want to rank well specifically for pitching would rank the best by naming it baseball_pitching.html or similar.

If you have a blog make sure that your permalinks are setup to display your blog title. By default blogs like wordpress index the pages by post date which gives you no SEO benefit so make sure to update your permalinks structure. This also means that when writing blog posts you should pay careful attention to your post titles and use keywords in your title that you’d like to rank well for in search. Elliot from ElliotsBlog.com wrote a great article detailing the SEO techniques he uses for his blog and mentions this permalinks technique as well.

These are quick and simple ways to improve your SEO! Tomorrow is day five along with the first day of the contest. Get ready for a new video tomorrow where I’ll be announcing the prizes for my first (and possible the first-ever) Domaining SEO contest!!!