The question is “Why are your domain names so long, with all those dashes in them? Should I be doing that as well?” (A domain name is the .com, .net, or .org part of a web site address – aka URL)

The “right” answer to this question depends significantly on how you intend to drive traffic to your site.

Best Domain Names for Offline Media

If you plan on using radio or television advertising, it is important to be able to make sure your domain name gets heard properly, and then subsequently typed into their browser when they get back to the computer. Combine that with being billed by air time, and you don’t want to waste time having to say the words “dash” between every word. You also want something catchy, rather than your company name. Like WinAFreeTrip.com or FreeCreditReport.com and so forth.

Best Domain Names for SEO

If you plan on using Search Engine Optimization to drive traffic to your site, you have a different battle. You see, people don’t actually type your URL in when using search engines, they just click on a link in the search results. If your domain name looks like spam, searchers will ignore it in the search results. If your domain name has nothing to do with what they’re looking for, they’ll ignore it as well.

But, here’s something interesting that few people realize, but it is VERY important to understand when creating a domain name. Google (and others) believe that the text used to link to your site/page is very descriptive of what will be found there. So when someone links to a page with the phrase “As Stupid as George Bush ”, it increases the chances that someone will find your page when searching for exactly that.

That’s the first piece of the puzzle – the next piece is that frequently, whether in forum postings, news releases, or what-have-you, people just type the full link to where they want you to go. The posting software automatically converts that into a link to your site. So when someone posts a link to your site using your domain name, the search engine sees that the words in the domain name are what someone will find there.

Let’s put that all together – if you have figured out that the people who you will sell your products best to are looking for information on Fog Horn Parts and you want to get search engines traffic to your site. You will do quite well to name your domain Fog-Horn-Parts.com . If .com isn’t available, .net, .org, .info, and .us are all possibilities.

What Google Sees

As a result, when someone links to your site with the text http://www.Fog-Horn-Parts.com , it will link to your site, and the search engines will see that “http www fog horn parts com” is what can be found at your site (turning the weird punctuation into spaces). You would do well, also, when possible, to leave out the “www” part – this wastes a word and distracts the search engine. You NEED the “http://” part to make the link work, so there’s no getting around that, I’m afraid.

You may ask yourself if people really do this – well, here are two real world examples linked to a site run Nina Hershberger who runs MegaBucks Marketing and makes a product called the wallet mailer:

• http://www.dankennedy.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=234&Itemid=200 links with the text “www.wallet-mailer.com”
• http://www.marketingbestpractices.com/Articles/a-most-amazing-direct-mail-letter.htm links with the text “http://www.wallet-mailer.com”

The result of these two links combined with the intentional choice of domain names for Nina’s site results in her site ranking ever so slightly better for the search “Wallet Mailer”, for which she has been coming up number one for several years now. And that’s where I come in. I largely do that through keyword research, article marketing, and a variety of on-page optimizations. (By the way: I use a LOT of pseudonyms, so you won’t be able to track my entire customer list, just by searching for my name.)

Now when someone wants a wallet mailer, Nina doesn’t even have to give them the domain name – all she has to say is “Look up ‘wallet mailer’ on Google, I’m the first link. ” While that’s a great claim for those in the right market, do not get yourself hyped up under the false impression that you can get to this point with such terms as “home loans” or “mortgage” without a tremendous budget behind you to build and maintain such a ranking.

To further justify this advice, some of the top press release and free-reprint-article publishers out there will absolutely not post articles that contain custom linking. They will only generate links back to your site when a full URL is typed into the article. So, you get a link. But the link text will only be your URL – so, the words in your URL have to count. That’s not to say that a link is meaningless. Sure, every link helps, but it makes a lot more sense to make it count as much as possible for your specific target keywords.

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Mark Joyner claims that he’s a blogging moron, and that he’d like your help reviewing his multimedia course on blogging.  So here’s his deal…

In exchange for posting the following code on my blog:

<div id="simpleology_blog_5d6c0d4d657fce5449be78315a6aefd3"><p>I’m evaluating a <a href="http://www.simpleology.com/training/blogging/index.php" _fcksavedurl="http://www.simpleology.com/training/blogging/index.php">multi-media course on blogging</a> from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they’re letting you <b><a href="http://www.simpleology.com/training/blogging/index.php" _fcksavedurl="http://www.simpleology.com/training/blogging/index.php">snag it for free</a></b> if you post about it on your blog.</p><p>It covers:</p><ul><li>The best blogging techniques.</li><li>How to get traffic to your blog.</li><li>How to turn your blog into money.</li></ul><p>I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it’s still free.</p></div>

Which ends up looking like this

I’m evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they’re letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.

I get to try out their courseware for free.  So, basically, the deal is: blog about their blogging stuff on a blog and you get their course.  Oh, and they’ve paid Google heftily, I’m sure, for the AdWords ad as well.

Here’s the page the Google AdWords sent me to:  http://www.simpleology.com/training/blogging/

If you’re interested, sign on up.  I imagine it probably has no idea if you take the code down immediately after you get the free software, but it’s a really cute idea for generating inbound links to your site and getting blog press.

Once you’ve posted and confirmed — witness the purity of the marketing machine at work.

• First, you sign up as a "member" — this makes you feel like your in some special club.
• Then you’re sent to a "BUY NOW for these special bonuses" page which has a whole bunch of completely unrelated crap as bonuses.  Some stuff about losing weight, stopping hair loss, the Atkin’s diet, meditation, and skin care.  I would smack any one of my clients for putting up a page like this.  I’m not always right…  I suppose it’s making him some money, or he’d have swapped out the bonuses for something that worked.  Or maybe the bonuses are really leaders into a number of his other product sites, and they’re not really bonuses at all, but infomercials for other products.  Regardless, you’re told — "Sign up now, or you’ll never see these bonuses again!"  Classic scarcity ploy.  But, the bonuses stink, so I don’t really care to sign up now… thanks.  You have to intentionally check the box which says "NO! I want to miss out on this once in a lifetime offer…" to make it through to the next page.  His button text is "Lock in My Decision" <ominous theme music follows>
• Oh, but wait… you click "No", then it sends you to ANOTHER page trying to hype it up some more.  You have to check the “No” box AGAIN.   It wasn’t there the first time I did it, so maybe it’s a split test thing to see if it increases takers.  An interesting idea.
• Next, he directs you to set his site to your home page.  Oh, my God.  Who wants that?
• Then, he directs you to install FIVE separate little spyware apps on your machine so that you’re always subjected to his branding messages.
  • Browser Bodyguard , Desktop Cockpit for Mac , Desktop Cockpit , Wimiki (no idea but he says it’s "essential") , Some Windows Vista Gadget
• Then he solicits the names and email addresses of some of your friends to further send the offer to…

It’s Simply amazing!

I suggest you sign up just to witness the wonderment of his raw marketing nerve.  When you think you’ve gone too far by asking for an email address in exchange for a white paper or free bonus, consider this example of the type of extreme marketing aggression and realize that the timid business owner is the one who goes hungry .

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After years of running an article site using ASP that I wrote from scratch (my development language of choice as the time – as there weren’t many on the market at the time), I decided to start running with one that had more of the features I was looking for already built in, rather than having to develop them all from scratch.

I’ve started dropping my old Type A habits and picking up some help here and there to get me through some of the stuff that doesn’t require my specific attention.  With all of that said, my Editor brought this article to my attention.  I was flummoxed by how horrible it was.

It was as if someone shoved a perfectly good article into a paper shredder at the same time as a thesaurus.  There is a popular product out there for randomizing your content called Content Spinner, or something like that.  This article looked like Content Spinner got ahold of it.  When I searched for the content on the page, very few actual results came back — so I’m thinking that the bulk of the articles posted in this manner were not accepted or have been deleted.  It would appear that some article marketers believe it’s more important to get links without any effort than it is to actually get links.

I’ve already deleted this flotsam from my Article Directory out of repulsion, so you won’t be able to find it there, but I found it elsewhere.  Read the article for yourself — You absolutely HAVE to read this .

http://www.allbestarticles.com/family/hobbies/extreme-basics-of-indoor-gardening.html

So…

• If you decide to run an article directory — which you may very well, even if it’s simply to drive traffic to your local business site, never ever let an article like this get on your site.  Absolutely everyone will hate you for it.  Children in Bosnia are crying because AllBestArticles.com (sic) posted that tripe.  You don’t want to make the children cry, do you?
• If you decide to give article marketing a shot, and you don’t hire me to handle it for you, absolutely make sure that you never end up with articles that look like the one above.

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