Each of these have their own pros and cons which we’ll get into a bit deeper down the road. I typically choose either option 2 or 3. Most of the time I choose option 3 and I imagine most first time website owners do too. By first time website owners, I mean those who aren’t redesigning their website, but are building the first website ever for a particular domain. If you’re redesigning a website then option 3 is not an option. You do not want to develop a redesign on the same domain as your live website. In that situation you want to build the website offline or on a development site, and then transfer the new site to the domain once it is fully completed and tested. In my opinion, there is no better option for backing up a WordPress site OR transferring a WordPress site, than Backup Buddy from iThemes. It truly is an amazing plugin and well worth the money. (Affiliate Link)

This article will outline WordPress plugins and procedures we recommend if you’re building a first ever website on a domain. You don’t want your website to be crawled by search engines until it has valid content, nor do you want any visitors to see a half-done, junky looking website. In fact, you’d like to get info from any of your website visitors so that you can let them know when your website launches.

1. Stop Search Engines From Crawling Your Site
As I mentioned above, you don’t want search engines crawling your site until the site is ready. The last thing you want is a search engine result that indicates that your website is under construction or coming soon, even after you’ve been launched for two weeks. Fortunately, WordPress makes this very easy. Login to the Admin Dashboard and click on the Settings section, then click on the Privacy link. This page gives you two clear choices: “Allow search engines to index this site” or “Ask search engines not to index this site.” Select the second option and click Save Changes. IMPORTANT: Once your site is ready to launch, go back to this page and select the first option. Otherwise, search engines will not include your site in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPS).

2. Install a Coming Soon or Under Construction Theme
The default themes that come preloaded with WordPress are nice, but they don’t do much to make you stand out or give your website a unique look. Consequently, you’ll want to create a custom design. Of course, we can help you with that, but if you’d like to do it yourself, we recommend putting up a nice Coming Soon or Under Construction page while your site is being built. This Anticipation theme (affiliate link) allows you to go ahead and start forming a relationship with your site visitors even before you launch. It allows you to tell about yourself, gather email addresses, share your Twitter and Facebook profile and share your site progress.

3. Work Behind the Scenes to Build Your Site
You may be thinking that by installing the Anticipation theme that we’ve just violated one of the guidelines I mentioned earlier: “You do not want to develop a redesign on the same domain as your live website.” Don’t worry, this warning does not apply here because your site does not contain any content yet. Therefore, there’s nothing to mess up! During this phase of construction, I use a plugin called Theme Test Drive. Theme Test Drive allows you to select a theme to work on behind the scenes. Anyone logged in as an admin will see the site that is active under Theme Test Drive, while the general public still sees the Under Construction theme. So you can tweak and work away on our site, and nobody will ever know it or see your completed site until you change the theme from the Under Construction theme to your new theme.

4. Speaking of Themes, Make Sure You Get a Quality WordPress Theme
When it comes to WordPress Themes, there are plenty of free themes and paid themes out there. A quick Google search will give you pages and pages of themes to consider. We’ve had mixed results with free themes. The vast majority of the time, we spend a lot more time tweaking and modifying free themes than we have paid themes. However, we’ve seen some pretty junky paid themes too. We fully endorse (and actively use) themes from iThemes and Elegant Themes. (affiliate links) We’ve also had really good success using themes from Theme Forest.

5. A Few More WordPress Plugins You Can’t Live Without
We’ll be going into a more in-depth look at our preferred WordPress plugins in a future blog post, but here are 3 other WordPress Plugins that you’ll want to install ASAP.

• Akismet:  Akismet is a POWERFUL tool that will weed out nearly all spam comments from your site.
• All In One SEO Pack: All In One SEO Pack is a great tool to guide you through getting your site optimized for showing up in SERPS.
• Google XML Sitemaps: Google XML Sitemaps is a plugin that will help you ensure that your site is being indexed  by Google and will even tell Google when you add fresh content to your site.

1. Don’t get too fancy with your website name. For example, I find it very frustrating when a website name is missing a vowel. If a website spells a word differently than how the word is naturally spelled, then people can’t simply tell someone else what the website name is. They will have to explain how to spell the website and hope that the other person remembers the odd spelling. If you think that the odd spelling will help people remember it, then you’re very likely wrong. In most cases, people will type out the normal spelling. If you insist on having a website with an odd spelling, you should also purchase the normal spelling and redirect traffic from the normally spelled domain over to your odd spelling domain.

2. If you’re in the United States, stick with a .com address. People will instinctively put .com at the end of any web address. If you think that www.perfectwebsitename.com is the best website name but someone else already owns that name, buying www.perfectwebsitename.net or www.perfectwebsitename.us will not help you. People will likely remember the “PerfectWebsiteName” part of your domain, but they’ll be more likely to put a .com on it than remember the .net or .us. This means that if www.perfectwebsitename.com is your competitor, you’ll be sending a lot of traffic to your competitor.

3. Try to pick out a name that reflects what your business does. For example, if you run a heat and air business that prides itself on speedy service, www.heatandairexpress.com might be good. Another option might be www.quickheatandair.com. Dramatic Traffic does a fair job in this area. While the name doesn’t instantly tell people what we do, the name has a close rhyme, which makes it easier to remember, and once you visit our site and see what we do, the name makes a lot of sense.

4. Avoid domains that are copyrighted. This may seem obvious, but it’s worth stating. All of my websites are built on the open source platform, WordPress. However, WordPress does not allow the use of the word WordPress in other domain names or titles. For example, this means I can’t use the domain, www.WordPressGuru.com. (this domain is in use, but is not associated with this website or any of our partner sites) or even The WordPress Podcast. I could, however, buy the domain and redirect it to my main domain. I just can’t have the publicly visible domain name to contain WordPress. Other companies have similar regulations, so do your homework before you spend a lot of time and money on a website you can’t use.

5. Do not use special characters in your domain name. The good thing is, most special characters are not allowed to be used in a domain name. In fact, only letters, numbers and hyphens can be used. Having said that, avoid numbers and hyphens. If you use numbers, you have to explain if people should use the number or spell out the number. If you have to explain how to type your domain, you’re doing it wrong. (See point 1 above)

6. Choose a fairly short name. This is not hugely important unless you get really carried away. It is VERY important to make sure your domain name is easy to remember. However, you don’t want to go overboard and create a domain that is too long to write out or use as an email address. My rule of thumb is to try and keep the domain name 3 words or less.

7. Avoid fluff or filler words. Remember that part I mentioned about getting natural traffic by choosing the proper domain name? That is achieved by choosing a good keyword and partnering it with a industry term (a great example of this www.halfpricebooks.com). Using words like www.AAAbooks.com or www.numberonebooks.com won’t do you any favors. Many domain registrars also provide good tools to help you discover domain names that have a similar meaning to what they believe you are trying to create. For example, if you type in a name a Network Solutions and it’s not available, they will automatically give you similar suggestions.

Good luck selecting your domain! We’re here to help you with all your website design and SEO needs.

Moving from one house to another house is never easy or fun, but if you properly prepare, the transition can be made smoother. And if you label everything carefully when you’re packing, when you get to the new house everything will be unpacked easily and put in it’s proper place. Moving a website to a new home is very similar.

Here are some tips to help make a smooth transition to the new domain. First, you need to set up 301 redirects for every single page, post and link. You want to set the 301 to link to a specific page on your new domain.  Do not set them all to simply redirect to the new homepage (MyNewExample.com).  Set the 301 to go to a very comparable page on your new domain. If that page does not exist, it’s probably worth creating. I don’t think it’s a big deal if a few of the 301 redirects point to the same place on your new domain, but try to make it as much of a 1:1 transfer as possible. If you’re using WordPress, a great redirection plugin is called Redirection by John Godley.

You’ll probably want to plan on keeping your current domain (www.Example.com) up for 120 days or so. This will give ample time for all the 301 redirects to really take root. Once all of your 301s are set up, sign in to Google Webmaster Tools and fill out a Change of Address Form. It’s under the Site Configuration section of your Dashboard.

One other thing I would suggest is contacting the people that link to your current domain (www.Example.com). You can find a list of links to your site in the Google Webmaster Tools dashboard too. Look through it, and if you see a lot of links from a site, contact them. Thank them for linking to your site and let them know that you want to make sure they’re providing the most up-to-date and accurate info to their visitors, and tell them what the new link should be. They just need to change their URLs to the new one. No 301 is necessary.

One final suggestion. Create new content on your new domain that is rich with the keywords you want to rank for. The fresh content will go a long way to giving you the rank you need. This is similar to what I suggested above, but make this content fresh and unique from the content you copied over from your current site. This step is not necessary if you did a fresh rewrite of the content you bring over from your current site. But if you do a straight copy of the content, make sure you write some fresh stuff too.

Good luck with your move!

The Podcasting 101 class will teach you what a podcast is and help you get started in podcasting. Topics covered include: How to choose a podcast host, choosing the right equipment, setting up an RSS feed, installing the proper podcast plug-ins on your WordPress site, getting your podcast submitted to iTunes & podcast production tips.

The class will be held on October 4th at 6:30 PM at The Div in Edmond, OK. More info about The Div can be found at The Div Website.

How do you choose the best SEO keywords for your site? Choosing the proper keywords for your site my seem overwhelming, or it may seem easy. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, don’t fret. If you think you already know the best keywords for your website, you may be very wrong. This post will show you how to take advantage of one of the best keyword resources on he Internet. The best part: it’s FREE!

The tool I’m talking about is the Google Keyword Tool. The Google Keyword Tool is a feature included in the Google AdWords program. While it does cost money to run Google AdWords, it is free to join the program, and you don’t have to spend money to use the Google Keyword Tool.

Once you’ve signed up for a free Google AdWords account and sign in, you’ll arrive at the Dashboard. Click on the Reporting and Tools tab and select Keyword Tool. Find the box labeled Word or Phrase and type in the keywords you think are best for your site. Find the box labeled Website and put in the URL of your site (optional). Once you’ve completed those steps, click on the Search button.

Now you will see two sections. The first section is labeled Search Terms and gives you information about the specific terms you typed into the Word or Phrase box. The second section is labeled Keyword Ideas and lists Google’s suggested keywords. Next to each keyword you will find a green bar that shows how competitive that keyword is in the AdWords market. This gives us some insight into how many people are bidding on that keyword. However, it does not give us a full picture of how many people are optimizing their websites for that term. In other words, if I own a pet store I may optimize my site for the keyword “Dog Collar,” but that does not mean that I’m also paying for the AdWord “Dog Collar.”

The next column is labeled Global Monthly Searches, and it is very helpful. This tells you how many times that keyword is searched for on Google. You can click on any of the column headers and sort that column in ascending order. Click the column header again to sort it in descending order.

This tool is great because it helps you figure out what people are searching for. Let’s look back at our pet store example. Let’s say that I own a pet store and I don’t call it a collar, but a restraint. Restraint is what it is called by pet industry insiders, my vendor calls it a restraint, and the packaging even calls it a restraint. So when I start making a list of keywords for my site, I might naturally choose the keyword “Dog Restraint.” However, the Google Keyword Tool tells me that there are only 4,400 monthly searches for that term. It turns out, most people actually use the term “Dog Collar,” and the Google Keyword tool tells me there are 673,000 monthly searches for that term. With those facts in mind, which keyword should I optimize my site for? Dog Collar, of course!

You may think that this is over simplifying an obvious search term, but I can tell you from experience that you will not choose the best keywords for your site without the Google Keyword Tool. Recently I was working on a site and input a list of keywords into the tool. It turns out, one of the words at the top of the list was not a very popular term. After going through the list of Keyword Ideas, I found a keyword that was being searched several hundred thousand times more per month, AND it had very little AdWord competition! I never would have found that valuable keyword without the Google Keyword Tool.

Here’s one final reminder. As I mentioned in a previous article, do not try to make every page rank for every keyword. The goal of this exercise is not to overload a page with every search term that receives a lot of monthly searches. You must still choose your keywords carefully.

1. Google Webmaster Tools-This is an invaluable resource.  If you have not yet signed up for Google Webmaster Tools, stop reading and go sign up right now! Once you get your site set up, you’ll be able to track many useful insights such as Google +1 Metrics, Crawl Stats, Link to Your Site, Site Performance and MUCH, MUCH more! In addition to this page, there is a Google Webmaster Tools Help page that is also invaluable. At the very least you should download and read the Google Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide.

2. Another great SEO Tool from Google is the Google Webmaster Central YouTube Channel. Here you will find hundreds of videos filled with tips, insights and listener-submitted questions. Each video is hosted by Google Search Engineer, Matt Cutts.

3. One last very helpful SEO Tool is the website SEO Book. SEO Book has more SEO resources than any other website I’ve found. The information at SEO Book is very well organized and easy to understand. They do have a paid service, so most of the information at SEO Book is not free. However, there are still some VERY useful videos, blogs, and training resources available at no cost. At the very least, make sure you visit the SEO Book Tools page. It provides several valuable resources such as the SEO Toolbar for Firefox, Rank Tracker Firefox extension and SEO for Firefox extension. These three tools are free and provide much of the insights provided by expensive SEO software.

There are many other great SEO Tools out there, but these three are a great starting point. Go check out these SEO resources and you’ll be learning how to improve your website’s SEO in no time!

How did Dramatic Traffic earn a top 11 ranking in Yahoo in just 2 days? We did it by making sure we built our site and subsequent pages with good SEO techniques. Does this mean that we (or you) will be able to replicate these results for every keyword? No, but that does not mean we shouldn’t try, right? Here’s what we did to get such a high ranking:

1. We made sure that the Title, Meta Keyword and Meta Description contained the keywords we were MOST interested in ranking for. We did not overload these fields with keywords. We focused only on the ones that mattered most to us.

2. We made sure there was original written content near the top of our home page that repeated those keywords.

3. We wrote a blog post that was about a specific keyword we wanted to rank high for. Let me repeat that. The blog post focused mostly on a single keyword. We’ll write other blogs about other keywords, but we wanted to rank high for that specific keyword, so we made sure that the blog post had that keyword mentioned several times. This ensured that the search engines would know that the keyword was very relative to the content on that page.

4. We made sure that the Title, Meta Keywords and Meta Description fields were focused on that keyword. Does that sound redundant? Yes, but that’s the point. The blog post was written with the intention of being a resource for those needing information about that keyword. By making sure the keyword was mentioned in the blog title, blog content, page title, meta description and meta keywords, the search engines had no problems recognizing what the article was about.

Let me also mention that the blog post not only contained the keyword multiple times, but it mentioned it early (within the first sentence) of the article.

Following these practices will get your website improved ranking in Google, Bing and Yahoo…guaranteed. Will it deliver results as quickly as this did for Dramatic Traffic? Sometimes. Will it get you on the first page or two of the search engines? Eventually. However, success like this is not often achieved by a single blog post. Many times you will need to continue to keep adding strong content to your site before you’ll get the ranking you desire. And that is exactly what we will keep doing.

Good Luck!

I recommend building your website using WordPress. I realize that WordPress will not work for all website needs, but it is a great platform that will more than meet the needs of most websites. Dramatic Traffic is built on WordPress, using the iThemes Builder platform. Even though I do know how to code websites, this entire site was built without me ever writing even a single line of code. I also recommend using HostGator to host your website. They have a great support staff, and installing WordPress requires only a few simple clicks. If you need more info about using or installing WordPress, contact me using the Contact slider on the left side of your screen. I will have future blogs and videos that cover WordPress details.

Once you have WordPress installed, click on Plugins, Add New, and search for XML Sitemap. I recommend the plugin called Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold. Go ahead and click on the orange Install button and then activate the plugin. Once it is activated, look for the XML-Sitemap link in the Settings section of your admin control panel. A page will pull up that shows various customizations that can be made to your sitemap. I don’t recommend changing any of the default settings. Instead, look near the top of the page and you will see a link to create your Sitemap. Simply click on that link and, voila! Your sitemap is done. The plugin will handle all the sitemap updates automatically, and it will even tell Bing, Google, and Ask.com when you add any content to your site!

If you are not using WordPress for your website, there are still some very helpful resources that help you create a sitemap. Google even has a Sitemap Generator that you can find here. If you need more resources, Google provides a Wiki of various Sitemap Generators. You can find those resources here.

Once you’ve created your XML Sitemap, you need to submit it to Google and Bing (unless you use the WordPress plugin I recommended above). Google and Bing both have Webmaster tools that are free. The tools at each of these sites are very helpful and should become a regular part of your data analysis routine. Once you have created an account at each site, you will see a button in the middle of the screen to add the URL of your site. You will then need to verify your site, using one of several methods they provide. Once you have completed that step, you will be able to submit your sitemap. On Google, look for a section on the lower right side that says Sitemaps. Then follow the directions to add your sitemap. For Bing, look for a section at the top of the page called Crawl. Click on it and you should then see a section labeled Sitemaps. Click on the link and follow the directions to add your sitemap.

As you can see, there are many resources at your disposal to help you get a sitemap added to your website with little or no pain. Take a few minutes right now to create your sitemap and submit it to Google and Bing. You’ll be glad you did!

Your website does not reside on a single street corner like a physical store does. Likewise, your website does not have merely a single point of entry (aka doors) like most physical stores do. Your website sits on the information super highway and has as many doors as it has pages. Each of these pages has the opportunity to bring the customer directly into your site and right to the spot that has the item or info they were seeking. Isn’t it a hassle to go to Walmart just for milk? Have you ever bought milk at a convenience store (and paid more) just because it was easier to locate? If you build your website’s SEO properly, you’ll have people coming to your site and arriving directly in front of the milk aisle. They’ll find exactly what they want and get it from you.

This principle teaches us not to worry about optimizing our homepage for every keyword. Instead, make sure you have strong landing pages for each of your optimal keywords. If you want your keyword to be found in Google, then take the time to build a door to that aisle. Make sure the page has 3-5 good keywords in the Meta Keyword field. Look at the Page Title and make sure it is using those same keywords, AND it is a readable sentence or phrase. Then fill in a good Meta Description that contains a point of action (buy, sale, free, limited time, exclusive, etc.), reuses the keywords, and is also human readable.

Once you have those steps completed, take a few minutes and write up original content for that door that is rich in the keywords you’ve been using. Oftentimes a supplier or vendor will provide this content for you. While using this content is better than nothing, Google will recognize that the content is not unique to your site, and it will not give you a lot of credit for it. This is what is referred to as “shallow content.” If possible, avoid shallow content. If the item or category or widget is worth building a dedicated page, it’s worth writing unique content for it.

Now you can see that your site will still contain all of the keywords that you want to be recognized for, and you will be bringing visitors directly to the content they are seeking. You’ll give them a better web experience, and your company will reap the benefits. Remember: if your homepage is telling the world about ALL the wonderful things you offer, to Google it’s actually saying nothing at all.

But if you were to make me choose between having only a PPC campaign or an SEO campaign, I would definitely choose to put my resources into ensuring I have good SEO. The reason is simple. If I properly optimize my website, I will get the ranking I desire in Google, Bing/Yahoo, etc., and I don’t have to worry about continuing to pump money into a campaign to maintain that rank. That does not mean that we should take a “set it and forget it” approach to SEO. I’m simply saying that results from a good SEO strategy have longer lasting results than a PPC campaign whose results end the moment my money dries up.

Both SEO and PPC are very easy to get started and yet take a lot of work to “perfect.” I use that term loosely because I do not believe it is possible to have a perfect PPC campaign or a website that has perfect SEO. Anyone who tells you otherwise is fooling themselves or trying to fool you. Here are some good SEO tips to help kick start your website SEO.

1. Design your website with SEO in mind. If you haven’t yet built or published your website then you are in a GREAT position to make sure you use SEO best practices from the very beginning. I’ll have more about this in future blog posts and videos. Don’t worry if your website is already published to the web. Go ahead and start implementing these best practices today and the results will come!

2. Make sure you are taking a few minutes to fill out the Title Tag, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords fields. These fields are very important to search engines. These fields often determine the information that will be shown on SERPs (search engine results pages). You may have heard that Google does not give any weight to the Meta Keyword field and you shouldn’t waste your time filling it out. While it is true that Google doesn’t pay any attention to the Meta Keyword field, Bing/Yahoo does. It certainly doesn’t hurt you to use this field. Just make sure the info you put there is relevant to the page content.

3. Make sure you are using ALT TEXT on all images on your site. This is your way to tell the search engine robots (also called spiders) what is in the picture. If you have a picture of your latest widget, robots can’t tell the world about it unless you include the description of the picture in the ALT TEXT field for that picture.

4. If your website is very large you may be overwhelmed with the thought of where to start. Don’t worry. SEO is a large task, but it is not an impossible one. I suggest you start in one of two places. Either start by optimizing your most popular pages or your newest pages. Your most popular pages might be your best selling items, most searched for pages or most visited pages. Then keep identifying the pages that will give you the biggest return on investment (ROI) and optimize those pages.

Okay, that’s all for today. There is MUCH more that can be said and will be said about SEO. Dramatic Traffic is here to help the world find the path to your door. We want them to find your widgets. Let us know if we can help.