Small Business SEO and Dating the Head Cheerleader

Small Business SEO, tactics and shortcuts

OK, so hopefully you followed my instructions from the previous post and you’ve went out and found your self one nice little search phrase on which to focus. If not, you are wasting your time by reading anything else… just sayin, you’ve been warned.

Alright, so we know what we want to rank for. When people search for [insert your phrase here], we want to be #1 on Google, Yahoo, and Bing, in the organic results, right?

Lets go Buy a Domain name at godaddy.com

So at this point, you’ve got your phrase picked out, and now you are ready to buy a good domain name. Do you know that this is on of the places where many businesses make the BIGGEST mistake. This mistake mostly has to do with your EGO, and wanting to have something COOL on your business cards. If your search phrase is “cheap baseball card deals” then you do NOT want to buy the domain: “daveskickassbaseballcardshop.com”. Although, I will admit, that does sound cool. If you are trying to get google to notice you when someone searches for “cheap baseball card deals”, then the one of the easiest ways to get them to notice you is to have that search phrase INSIDE of your new domain name.

So what domain name do you want to buy?

That’s right: “www.cheapbaseballcarddeals.com” or some very close variation. This is one of those tricks that people have a hard time getting past. Its all about your EGO. Nobody wants the word “cheap” in their business’s domain name, right? Cheap is bad, right? Well, what do you think people search for? They search for “cheap!!!!.” It doesn’t mean that our business is of low quality. It just means that we are smarter than the rest, and we paid $8 bucks on godaddy for this domain name that was just waiting for us to snatch up!

I hate the word “Cheap”

Cheap is not bad

Just a brief aside. You are going to be publishing content on your site every day hopefully. Most of that content is going to now have the words “cheap baseball card deals” dropped in at every chance. That’s bad right? NOPE! Get creative buddy. You are going to write TONS of articles with the phrase “cheap baseball card deals” embedded everywhere. Here are just a few ideas I have for titles: “why buying cheap baseball card deals is bad”, “cheap baseball card deals lead to fraud”, “cheap baseball card deals are leading to fraud crackdowns”, “cheap baseball card deals can be a dangerous game”. Please tell me that you get the idea. You could write 5 articles on this topic and be THE expert source on “cheap baseball card deals.”

Yes! go buy your domain name. Just remember…google LOVES your domain name to have your keyword phrase in it. Also…a little techie point…you can buy 20 domain names and have them all point to the same website. So don’t worry, if we make a mistake, we can just buy a different domain name later, ok? Good..

So how is SEO like dating the Head Cheerleader?

We’ll go into more detail in the next post, but the clip below may give you some hints. Just so you know, in our case the head-cheerleaders are sites like youtube.com, amazon.com, twitter.com, myspace.com, vimeo.com, wikipedia.com, and others. In the next post we will look into how to take advantage of the huge reputations and power that these sites have to push your organic search rankings to the top.

Below is a sneak-peak video from that upcoming post. Think about our High-School analogy about SEO while you watch this.

See also:

Search Terms:

• Small Business SEO
• Keyword Research
• Rank #1 on Google