As I mentioned in our recent post, 5 Practical SEO Tips to Increase Traffic, it is imperative for your business to start search engine optimization (SEO) on a firm foundation.

There are many on-page and off-page facets of SEO to focus upon.

When engaging with customers, I can’t stress the importance of having a solid and intimate understanding of practical SEO.

Know the difference between good and sound SEO principles versus bad and detrimental SEO principles.  And yes there can be a fine line between the two SEO types.

Take a moment and step back when SEO gets blurry or confusing as to what is right or wrong.  Stop, collect yourself and diligently seek honest information when this occurs.

Spike Lee said it best, “Do the right thing!”  Do the honest and for sure thing that is right (white-hat SEO), even if it will take you a longer time to see results.  

The price of .com domains has skyrocketed, as have the number of domain leasing opportunities.

Much like physical real estate, domain names, especially .com domains, have become quite expensive and will likely increase exponentially in years to come.

From small start-ups to mom-and-pop shops to national chains to global conglomerates, the one commonality all can agree on is the need for a premium domain name to generate greater customer growth and revenue for their business.

With more and more businesses being started by entrepreneurs or those involuntarily forced to, the need for a short, memorable, and search-friendly .com domain name is in great demand. At the same time, those mentioned attributes of a .com domain name are in short supply.

Many short, memorable, and search-friendly .com domain names are accounted for and have been for quite some time.

Business owners starting in business or looking to take their start-up to the next level will pay more than a pretty penny to secure ownership in such domain names.

Knowing that a premium .com domain name may be out of your grasp or price range, leasing a domain name instead of buying it is becoming a less expensive, popular, and simple way of starting or taking an online business to the next level.

Practical search engine optimization (SEO) tips that drive bottom-line results are hard to come by these days, depending upon the following:

• who you ask.
• what topics you’re in search of.
• how do you go about implementing and executing tips?

From off-site optimization tips, such as effective link-building strategies and social signals, to on-page optimization tips, such as keyword focus and proper meta and page tag usage, there are countless search engine optimization techniques and strategies to focus on. 

Most website owners want to know how to increase organic search traffic.

Oftentimes, they base their search engine optimization techniques and strategies on what will bring the biggest bang for the buck in the shortest amount of time.

Yes, I know this is a broad stroke of the brush.

In today’s post, I hope to provide you with our top 5 practical SEO tips that are proven to help your website to generate greater customer growth and revenue.

There are many more, but focusing on these 5 practical SEO tips will surely help you get a firm foundation to dive deeper in implementing and executing more search engine optimization techniques.

Let’s get started!

Today’s post is about search engine optimization’s new future: Google Authorship.

If you have heard or read about this new search engine ranking vehicle, read up.

A few years ago, Google introduced an unusual approach for authors to boost search engine rankings: Google Authorship.

Using this tactic, you convince Google that you are the author of your posts, and by doing so, you can stop piracy.

You actually register your words through Google Authorship, so nobody else can steal and publish your work as their own.

You have to set up your Authorship profile using your optimized Google+ account, and when your website appears in the search results, it displays your photo next to the search result, as shown below.

You might already have seen some results displayed by Google that show a photo of the author along with the link.

These search results definitely have more appeal than other plain-looking results owned by authors with no identity whatsoever.

Using Google Authorship is quite easy and straightforward.

Allow me one moment to make a statement about what you are about to read and how it can change the way your online business operates.

Simply put, your business will be one or the other:

OPTION ONE: 

Most of you reading this post will either decide to put together a plan to purchase or implement local domain names for your business as a cost-effective method to drive more qualified local website traffic and sales.

-OR-

OPTION TWO:

Allow your competition to shut and lock the door to your business using one of the greatest search engine secrets, outside of capitalizing on type-in traffic, to generate greater customer growth and revenue: local domain names.

Successful and highly profitable online businesses attain great respect for web analytics.

Web analytics are imperative in determining how successful and effective your website operates and converts customers.

One of the first metrics I check when entering into a consultation or an agreement with a business for search engine optimization or search engine marketing services is the website bounce rate for both individual pages and overall website.

For those unfamiliar with this term, a website’s bounce rate is the number of visitors that arrive at a website, view one page, and exit without viewing another page within the website.

Website Bounce rate can be calculated as an overall numeric value of a page or entire website as an average, although it is typical to be reported as a percentage.

Bounce rate as a metric is a very instrumental metric to help guide businesses in understanding which pages are effective or ineffective in terms of interesting their visitors.

Exact match domains (EMDs) are domain names that contain the exact name of a business or an exact keyword for ranking high in search engines.

Because of the value and quality of such premium domains, people started registering exact match domains just to rank high and did not have anything worthwhile to offer.

Google launched an exact match domain algorithm to track such domains down and giving them less weight than those that were actually real websites and not spam.

So, today we will address the question of why companies should consider exact match domains when performing search engine optimization (SEO)?