Just when you think you have the perfect name for your business or you think of the most perfect domain name, you find out that the domain is registered.

Start over, surely not? Don’t let a domain name being registered get you down, especially if a website has not been developed on the domain.

You may or may not know it, but there are many ways to go about landing the perfect domain name to build your business on. One of the most common ways to land the domain name of your dreams is by buying it via an expired domain auction.

As luck would have it, sometimes domain owners forget to renew their domain names or purposely don’t renew their domain names for a multitude of reasons.

Nevertheless, one domain owner’s misfortune in losing a domain name can be your luck in finding and buying an expired domain name.

Today, I’ll discuss a few things you’ll want to consider when finding and buying expired domains. The entire process of finding and buying expired domains can be a rollercoaster experience, to say the least.

Nevertheless, with persistence and patience, you can end up with the domain of your dreams finding and buying it as an expired domain. Let’s get started.

Every so often, I either receive an email, or phone call, or have a conversation with a potential customer or customer about the pitfalls of moving web pages from sub-directories to the top directory of the website.

Unbeknownst to some, your web architecture is a vital part of your search engine optimization (SEO) effort and content, in addition to creating unique, value-add content that focuses on customers first and search engines second.

When designing or redesigning your website, it is imperative to understand how web architecture, including URL structure, can positively and negatively impact your website’s potential to rank in search engines highly.

Today’s post will try to shed light on SEO advantages and disadvantages of not planning your web architecture to be SEO-friendly or changing your web architecture without considering the SEO impact.

Is it best to have multiple keywords on an optimized page or create multiple optimized pages with different keywords?

I received this question in an email last week from a customer trying to determine the best SEO strategy for optimizing their website content. I thought it was an interesting question, rather questions, for a number of reasons.

I can see through this questioning and quite clear. The customer is grasping at every straw possible to drive do-it-yourself SEO results in the shortest amount of time possible.

They are viewing SEO as a science based on a magical SEO formula to rank well rather than both art and science.

It’s much like a man showering a woman with gifts, dinner, and no conversation of any sort and expecting the woman to fall in love with him for who he is and not what he gives. You get the point, but I digress.

SEO is both an art and science when it comes to refining and finessing your optimized content marketing efforts.

We’re back in the saddle for another fun-filled post about SEO and doing it yourself.

Do-it-yourself SEO, or DIY SEO, as it is also known, can be quite an experience for small business owners looking to take matters of SEO into their own hands.

Whether you have had a good or bad experience with SEO, in general, there is always a thought that crosses one’s mind: they too could optimize their website to rank well in search engines just as good as, if not better than, SEO professionals.

In addition to performing small business SEO for multiple customers, I’ve experience coaching and consulting a fair share to do SEO themselves.

Some small business owners take SEO coaching and consulting like a fish to water. They succeed in learning, executing, and sustaining sound SEO strategies and tactics to keep their websites highly visible and ranked in major search engines.

But with the good comes the bad who were too smart for their good and stepped on the dark side of SEO due to impatience, naïve, or shrewdness.

And for their unjust actions, they return to me or another SEO professional, endlessly pleading with us to rescue their website from black-hat SEO snares, penalization, or de-indexation in search engines.

I proclaim that anyone can learn do-it-yourself SEO and find success or failure.

But most small business owners don’t truly consider all facets of do-it-yourself SEO.

Most of the time, the do-it-yourself SEO approach is entered blindly based on small business owners not having adequate resources related to time, money, and labor or effort.

And just like you need the S, E, and O to spell SEO, you also need time, money, and effort to invest in an ongoing SEO.

So before you launch into do-it-yourself SEO, let’s take a moment to discuss some common do-it-yourself SEO pitfalls, so you can thoroughly understand the pros and cons of do-it-yourself SEO before causing great harm to your business and having to call the SEO professionals in to clean up the mess.

I’m constantly asked about the length of time it takes to see SEO results and why results cost so much.

It’s to the point that I now start most conversations by informing the customer that it takes anywhere from 1 hour to years to see SEO results. 

Based on the website’s health and a long list of various SEO attributes, customers could immediately see positive or even negative SEO results.

So there, I said it. You can expect to see positive or even negative SEO results immediately.

The irony in making such a broad, sweeping statement is that neither party has an accurate definition of “immediately,” nor can either party definitively express in great clarity what “SEO results” are and are not.

SEO professionals’ lack of clear definition and communication typically sets unrealistic expectations in both time and results for most website owners.

And confusion enters amongst a twisted he said, she said game of trying to figure out whether SEO results were delivered as promised and on time.

Let me start by making one thing clear: brandable or keyword .com domains can rank well in search engines.

There will always be pros and cons to using each type of .com domain name.

This week I received an email inquiring about whether or not it is “better” to build or develop a business website on a brandable domain or a keyword .com domain.

How the question was worded was more a focus on search engine optimization (SEO) than an overall focus on how their domain name should align with their business goal and objectives.

I could sense there was a strong desire to make money taking the “by any means necessary” approach.

There was more weight given to SEO to the point that they were ready to make a heavy investment to create thousands of optimized keyword domain websites around a certain niche.

What they were really asking me was, “Which, brandable domain or multiple keyword domains, can bring me the most traffic and, most importantly, money with the least amount of time, money, and effort invested?”

Exact match domains (EMD) is a difficult conversation to have for many website owners, developers and SEO professionals.

Each has their own isolated experiences of success and failure when using exact match domains, both pre and post Google EMD update.

If you don’t know about the Google EMD update, then I suggest you do a little reading on how Google released an exact match domains update.

In short, Google created a filter to remove low/poor quality websites using exact match domains from ranking in search engine results.

Because websites using exact match domains contained the keywords in the domains that users used when searching, they were easily ranked as authoritative websites in search results.

With the intro of the Google EMD update, many website owners and developers were hit hard in loss of rankings, traffic and revenue.

Others were penalized to the point of de-indexed in some cases for their websites using exact match domains, also known as keyword domains.

From sea to shining sea, you’ll read and hear mixed reviews when attempting to find a final resolve for whether you should or should not use exact match domains.

However, my hope is to help you thoroughly understand why and how exact match domains can be used effectively and ineffectively.