Jimmy asked:
- Would you say its better to have your domain name relevant to the sites content or actual highly searched for keyword that will be optimized on the site?
- Content — Do you recommend hiring someone to write content if we cant do on our own? how exactly does this work?
- I’ve been told that a high CPC value is important on those highly searched for keywords that your optimizing. What exactly does that mean? How does it work as far as making money?
Dumbed down answers please! Thanks Jimmy
My reply:
Hi, Jimmy –
1. Example: If your website is only about chickens, then having the domain name of chickens.com (or .net or .org) would be best. If your domain is about barnyard animals, then having a page on it optimized for chickens ( www. barnyard-animals.com /chickens.html ) would be best. I would think more searches would be made every day for “chickens” than “barnyard animals”.
2. It’s not hard to write content for a website. But if you can’t do it yourself, then by all means have someone else write content for you. Contact a writer (you can get bids on what you want by posting a notice on www.elance.com ). Give the writer a list of the pages you want, the keywords to be covered on each page, and have them put at least 250 words of text on the page. If the writer is any good, he will interview you and get the info needed to write the pages by picking your brains, or the brains of whoever has the info you need to go on the web pages.
3. I don’t understand your question.
The cost of CPC has nothing to do with optimizing a website for good natural rankings in the search engines. There is probably *some* correlation between the cost of an expensive CPC term, and how many people search for that keyword. But: one of the most popular searches recently was “Brittney Spears” — yet last time I checked, there’s only one person bidding on that keyword at Google Adwords, so the cost of the CPC for that term is minimal. “Brittney Spears” just doesn’t seem worth much as a paid CPC term because there’s so much free stuff out there about her.
Then again, “life insurance” is both an expensive CPC term, and a very popular search term.
The external Google keywords tool here:
https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal will give you actual counts of how many people are searching for which terms every month at Google.
If you want to know what people are paying for certain CPC terms, use the free tool at www.spyfu.com.
Hope this info helps.
Best,
Jere Matlock
SEO Specialist
www.wordsinarow.com
Jimmy sent me some more questions:
Thanks for the info. just a couple follow up questions…
1. as far as SEO is concerned, how much better is it to have www .chickens .com versus www .barnyardanimals. com/ chickens if my site is all about Chickens? If I’m trying to land high in the search engines when the word “chickens” is searched for. Can i still get the same results if i have the latter?
2. thanks for the content suggestion.
3. What I thought is that CPC values effect your payout with google adsense? so if “Chickens” had a CPC of $5, anytime someone clicked one of my google adsense links, I would get paid a % of the $5? is that not right?
Thanks a lot!
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My reply:
Hi, Jimmy –
1. I don’t think it matters much which of the domains you use, if you have the keyword somewhere in the URL (either in the domain or in the page name).
3. Yes, CPC values do affect your payout with Google Adsense (I was looking at it only from an SEO standpoint). You are correct that when someone clicks an Adsense ad on your site, you make a percentage of that click. So yes, if your business model is to make money from Adsense ads, then it makes sense to go after popular keyword terms that cost a lot.
Best,
Jere
And Jimmy had a couple more questions after that:
—————
Hey Jere, great information.
So essentially if i had the domain http://www.barnyardanimals.com and it was all about chickens, i should have multiple pages such as…
www . barnyardanimals. com/ chickens
www . barnyardanimals. com/ chickenfood
www . barnyardanimals. com/ chickencare
www . barnyardanimals. com/ chickenfarms
assuming that “chickens” “chicken food” “chicken care” and “chicken farms” were the most frequently search terms in the search engines?
Also, doesn’t the amount of competing pages for those search terms come into play? So if “chicken farms” was typed in like 50,000 times per month, it will most likely have a ton of competing pages (ie 10 million) in google/yahoo. that’s a lot to compete for. no?
So are the ideal keyword phrases for each page of your site, those phrases that have a lot of type ins but few competing pages? And also how relevant those keywords are to the topic you’re discussing? Which is more important in regards to getting a high rank?
Thanks again.
Jimmy
My reply ——————–
Hi, Jimmy –
I think you’ve got it worked out well.
I never worry about how many pages I’m competing against – it just doesn’t seem relevant. If you’re trying to maximize the ad revenue from AdSense ads on your site, I can see where it is important to go after the most frequently searched terms, but the number of competing pages just doesn’t seem relevant to me.
Best,
Jere
Ciao, I was viewing on google for software that automatically could submit links to divers socialbookmarking sites. When searching I came past a piece of software called “Bookmarkwiz”. This dude’s site is bookmarkwiz. com (his coming-soon page is online) Myself, I think it looks really attractive. Manually submitting my webpages to folkd and delicious and alike is taking days of my time and outsourcing it is not really cheap aswell. Some automated solution will solve my headaches. I’ve seen alot of visitors here talk about socialbookmarking.. what do you people think? maybe some of you have any acquaintance with software like this? I think social bookmarking is a smart way to maximize backlinks and traffic…
Hi, Rodriquez –
I don’t know of any software that will automatically post a website in all the various social bookmarking sites. We use the “addthis” button from http://www.addthis.com, and it lets visitors bookmark whatever they want from our content in their favorite social bookmarking sites.
We also use http://www.socialfollow.com as a method of making it easy for people to follow us on twitter, linkedin, and other social media sites.
I know it can be tedious and time-consuming to go out and bookmark a site in all the various social bookmarking sites. It may not pay off to do so, as many of them use the “rel=nofollow” code on their links to your site. However, if you can generate some social marketing buzz about your site, it may be worth your time.
In my experience, blog posts that are controversial, or funny, will get picked up by your visitors and shared virally. Marketing copy won’t get forwarded unless it is info on a hot new product like the iPhone or the latest xBox, and it has to have some information in it worth sharing with friends.
Hope this helps.
Best,
Jere Matlock