Is your domain good enough? You may ask yourself this question after reading Making Money With Video, by Chris over at SearchAnyway Blog. Chris, pointing out the importance of choosing a good domain for your website, uses my site as an example (making sure that it is an example of an exception to the rule):

Choosing a domain name: ……. This is very sound advice. Although there are those that have managed to violate that rule as well, they are the exception rather than the rule. In short, good keyword domains are nearly impossible to find, so short, snappy, and easy to spell are definitely your first considerations.

I think when you think in terms of Marketing, choosing a catchy and easy to remember and spell domain name is important. When it comes to SEO, as I see it, there is much “copy” and “paste” involved here. Of course it makes a lot of difference if you understand where to copy and paste from and into. For example the quote above, was copied and pasted into this article directly from Chris’ blog. Was it difficult to do? Not really. Funny thing is that I copied an evidence that it was not difficult for Chris neither to copy and paste the URL to one of my posts, no matter how uncatchy and uneasy to remember my URL is.

As I mentioned in the article about my strange URL, if I had to do it now, I would probably choose a different one. But there was at least one comment on that post in my defense:

I wouldn’t worry about it, you can rank for all types of things.
It is actually good to have one blog that is just you, and that you won’t be tempted to sell.

So if you write good content people will do the SEO magic for you- copy and paste your URLs desite it being unmemorable and difficult to spell. While I agree with Chris about importance of choosing good domain name, I would like to poit out that “the exeption to the rule” that in some cases my site enjoys is a result of hard work and not just freak luck. Don’t expect to have you site listed on the first page of Google only because you have a keyword in your domain name, or because it is catchy and easy to remember.

If you are planing to attend Search Engine Strategies conference in New York City (April 10-13), one of the companies you should look for is Adapt Technologies. In a recent press release company has announced that it will participate in the conference with intention to promote their new product SEM-in-a-Box.

I have previously written about the product. The reason company caught my eye was that their product SEM-in-a-Box offers you an opportunity to manage Panama, Google AdWords and MSN AdCenter  (Update: Erica Forrette from Adpot Technologies just e-mailed me to correct me that MSN AdCenter is can not be managed via SEM-in-a-Box, hopefully “yet” I will add) pay per click campaigns in one interface. Campaign Converter, which comes free with SEM-in-a-Box, allows you to prepare properly-formated campaigns for Yahoo! Panama using your current Google AdWords campaigns keywords, settings and configurations.

In the press release, Micheal Harris, CEO of Adapt stated:

As search marketing becomes more complex and time-consuming, even smaller companies need help with optimizing their efforts while spending less time on campaign management, SEM-in-a-Box offers a cost-effective solution to these marketers who may not be able to afford hiring a consultant or agency.

While I personally am still not convinced about cost-effectiveness of the product when it comes to smaller advertisers like myself, company definitely has my attention and I will try to cover closely Adapt’s latest developments and products.

It has been a few weeks now since I started to experiment with getting trackbacks from PRWeb. I have done it with several different blogs and websites. In fact I have received number of visitors who found my blog on Google through “benefits PRWeb“, so I think it would be a good time to give an update.

What are the benefits?

First if you wonder whether or not there is any value in getting a tackback to your wesbite from PRWeb, then you should think “long term” to truly appreciate such link. Unless you find an “aged” press release then of course benefits can come quicker than you may think. I am not sure though that if it is possible to get trackbacks from the archived releases at PRWeb. I believe it is because these releases are no longer “news”. So far I could not find an archived release that would offer you trackback.

So how does it benefit you to get a trackback from PRWeb. It’s very simple. Trackback URL from PRWeb do not use “nofollow”- Google will count those as “pointers” to your website. While the track back from a new pres release will come from a page on PRWeb ranked at 0, the domain is www.prweb.com has PR 7- Google crawls is more often and deeper, thus raising a chance of your link to be “discovered”. If you get the trackback, within few days you can notice a difference as I did with Yugster and YouTube.

How easy is to get trackback from PRWeb?

In the beginning of my experiment I thought that releases in certain categories do not automatically give you trackback. While I can not confirm with absolute certainty, I do believe this feature is in the hands of the author of press release. I have received two trackbacks from PRWeb in very competitive categories such as financing and web hosting. Some pres releases will give you a trackback right away while some probably never will. But there was also one time that I received trackback from PRWeb one week after I referenced the release in one of my blogs.

Also, not every press release has trackback enabled. Nevertheless if you like to break a good story now and then on your blog, PRWeb is a good place to find such stories. Benefiting from trackback should come as an extra bonus to you.

That was exactly what I asked myself today while reviewing the web statistics of my blog. Evidently my blog was found on Kartoo. Turns out it is a search engine that returns the search results in from of a map. I am not sure about efficiency of search results but it sure is entertaining.

Evidently it uses Flash Player to show the results in a form of map. If you don’t have Flash Player you can still use an HTML version, but it is not nearly as fun as flash version is. You can search the web in seven different languages. You can also choose the default search engine to collect the results (Google is not on their list).

If you are trying to get Googlebot to notice your WordPress site there is no better solution than using Google Site Map Plug-In. Wonderful thing about this plug in is that it automatically regenerates your sitemap every time your publish or edit content of your web site. Also it pings Googlebot every time your new site map is generated. Our website was visited by Googlebot maybe once every two weeks before we started using plug-in. Now Googlebot literally comes to crawl our site every day.