PitchPersuasion

SEO has become one of the most important factors online with more and more consideration being put into it Year-On-Year.  One area which is often overlooked is the optimisation of a domain name/brand.

The first consideration for domain name SEO is based on whether you are aiming to develop a brand or simply a mindless website.  Most would probably say yes, that they are either developing a brand or a mini/micro-site for a brand.

Second one must consider two of factors which most search engines notably Google hold in high regard for domain names:

-Age of the domain: Older domains will be considered more important especially if they have had a consistent keyword theme.

-Inbound links (IBLs): Everyone knows that the more links they get pointing to their site the better, especially if they are from other sites with high pagerank.

With these two considerations in mind lets look at two examples.

Example 1: LeWeb

Context: LeWeb is one of the largest annual events which is focused around Internet entrepreneurs each year in Paris.

Why: This is an example which I would consider to be the ‘wrong’ way to go around keeping your brand alive and increasing its web presence year-on-year/campaign-on-campaign.

Problem: When I search for LeWeb on Google, the first result I come across is from the event in 2007 and not the more recent 2008 edition. Quel Disastre !

Solution: The easiest solution for them to follow would be to use their leweb.net address and create a sub-domain for each year/event. e.g.  http://2007.leweb.net, http://2008.leweb.net.. and so on.  This works especially well if you have a different developer/agency working on your site each year.

Alternatively they could simply have www.leweb.net/2007/, www.leweb.net/2008/…  Often simplicity is the key!

Example 2: Carsonified

Context: An events company focussed on running events for developers and entrepreneurs in the UK.

Why?: Because they’re doing it right!

Examples:

FOWA London 2008: http://events.carsonified.com/fowa/2008/london/content

FOWA Dublin 2009: http://events.carsonified.com/fowd/2009/london/

Conclusion: New domain names for brands which you want to keep alive year on year need to be under the same core domain name. The examples here are for events however it applies to everything from sites which release annual reports through to mini/micro-sites.

This week my main post is slightly delayed so I’ve added a small ‘tapas’ feature to help out people who are launching new sites and campaigns online. If you are really sensible you might even build it into a pitch and bill the time you spend doing it!

Essential Hit List

1. To even vaguely give the world a chance at finding your site, bookmark your page (and every page/post your create) using Del.icio.us (1min) or even better using Social Marker (30min+ if you do all the social bookmarking sites).

2. Get a twitter account (30secs) and email all your clients & prospects with the details (30secs) and use it as a news ticker of what you do each day including links to your site (1min a day).

3. Add a listing on DMOZ, it’s regarded as one of the most important directories for sites to be listed. (2mins)

4. Post a constructive comment each day on a blog that you read regularly including a link back to your site. (30sec)

5. Create news, move from: ‘We started work on a new project today’ to ‘x agency/company started work for x company today’ and syndicate it using NowPublic and email it to the right people at places like Brand Republic & Mad.co.uk. (30sec)

In reality to get started it may take you a bit more than 5 minutes to start doing everything here but if you get into a rhythm it should really help build up your audience.