Writing for Your Wealth

This is the third post in the How to Build Passive Income with Article Sites Series.

Today it’s all about the domain name and other basic SEO considerations. I confess to finding this stuff a tad dry (writing and scheming new things to write about is more fun), so let me apologize up front for any irreverence that may creep into this post (I tend to see SEO as little more than a necessary evil).

Moving on…

In the last post, Choosing a Profitable Niche and Scoping out the Competition, we decided it might be worth targeting tennis ball machines as a keyword for a small article site. Let’s go ahead and stick with that example as we talk about domain names and SEO.

Choosing a SEO-friendly Domain Name

When you’re just building a small site, it’s definitely to your advantage to put your main keyword phrase in your domain name. You’re not likely to get as many links as a big site that is constantly being updated will, so it’s important to do the little things right. Since the Google gods in particular give a little extra weight to a site with the keyword in the URL, we’re going to stick it in there.

Since we’re optimizing for tennis ball machines, we might choose tennisballmachinesfaq.com or some such. This gives us an edge for “tennis ball machine,” “tennis ball machines,” “tennis machine,” “ball machines,” and any other combination of terms where the words are in your URL.

Even if you’re going to focus on “tennis ball machines” as your keyword for your main index page, you may find that you naturally get traffic from searchers looking for those other combinations of the term as well.

I like to add on the ‘s’ whenever it makes sense (i.e. people might look up both the singular and plural of the word). That way you’ll get credit for each, since both “machine” and “machines” are in the URL.

Dashes in Domain Names or Not?

For a while, dashes were all the rage because it was believed Google only saw the words if they were separated that way. I don’t think the Big G was ever that obtuse, but it’s certainly not today, so there’s not really any advantage to using dashes in the domain name. In fact, humans (we like to consider them once in a while) may judge your site as spammy if you have a lot of dashes, i.e. tennis-ball-machines-faq.com.

You’re probably never going to put these little article sites on a business card, but that perception of a spammy address might be the difference between someone mentioning your site (and giving you a free link) in a blog post and not.

You may want to consider a dash, however, if the domain name you want is already taken. Also, if the way your keywords happen to run together makes the address hard to read (especially for longer domain names), then you may want to use a dash or two for clarity. Personally, I just try to find a creative way to get the keywords I want in without a terribly long and unwieldy URL.

One trick is to add a word to the front of whatever name you brainstormed. A lot of people think of changing the ending (tennisballmachinetips.com, tennisballmachineinfo.com, etc.) but fewer try adding words to the front (abouttennisballmachines.com).

You get the idea, and that’s probably (more than) enough on this scintillating subject.

More SEO fun — using keywords in article and file names

Just when you thought it couldn’t get any more exciting…

In addition to using keywords in the domain name, we’ll want to use them in our articles too.

Note: This doesn’t mean every page on our site should have “tennis ball machines” in the article title and file name. While all our articles will fall under the topic of tennis ball machines, each page on your site should focus on targeting a different keyword.

We’ll talk more about finding extra keywords and basing articles around them in the next post, but for now, let’s do a quick example.

Let’s say we’ve done some research and we find that people are searching for reviews on Lobster Elite tennis ball machines (they’re typing in “lobster elite review”). We’re going to exploit that by writing an article on that subject, and to make sure people find our article, we want to use the precise term people are searching with in the title and file name.

Example:

Article tile: “Lobster Elite Review”
Article file name: lobsterelitereview.htm (the full address would be tennisballmachinesfaq.com/lobsterelitereview.htm)

This will help our article to show up when people type in “lobster elite review,” though we’ve also got a shot at snagging folks who type in “lobster elite” and “lobster elite tennis ball machine.” The first two keyword phrases are handled by the title/file name, and tennis ball machine is in the URL, so we’re good there too.

Some people might do a double whammy by choosing a name that gives us something like tennisballmachinesfaq.com/lobster-elite-tennis-ball-machine-review.htm but again I’d be wary of names that end up too long or too spammy looking.

While it’s possible to build up a site and start ranking through paid links or links you’ve gotten from article marketing (we’ll discuss these methods of link building more later), I always assume that human beings will be looking at my site, too, human beings who might just have the power to give me a free link if I provide a good resource. The less spammy your SEO tactics look, the more likely your site won’t turn off human visitors.

(My best performing article sites tend to be ones that have scored natural links from directories, blogs, etc.)

Using keywords in the article content

Another basic on-page SEO principle is to use the keywords in the content–the text of the article.

Remember, we’re only going to focus on one keyword per page (it is possible to optimize for multiple keywords, but you’ll frequently have more success just sticking to one per article). You may rank for variations of that keyword (if you focus on “lobster elite review”, we may get the people looking up “lobster elite” and “lobster elite tennis ball machine” too), but as far as writing the content goes, it’s easier to keep things natural with just one keyword phrase in mind.

Generally I find that just keeping my keyword in mind is enough to remember to sprinkle it naturally through the article. I don’t worry about “keyword density” (there’s a whole art form dedicated to figuring out what percentage of the total words on the page should be keywords); I just try to use a keyword once a paragraph or so, maybe twice in the first paragraph.

You do sometimes have to fight that writers’ instinct to use synonyms instead of repeating the same word over and over. However, you don’t need to (and shouldn’t) use the keyword so often that people who aren’t in the industry (SEO) will notice or find anything awkward about your article.

See? That was dry stuff. I warned you!

In the end…

Will these principles get your pages to the top of the search engine results overnight? No, and even if you spend time getting links to your site (crucial for ranking), it’ll take time, but at the end of the day, applying these “on site” SEO steps to your site and your articles will give you an edge over someone who doesn’t.

And unlike with Adsense and purely content writing topics, I feel the need add a disclaimer here:

I’ve never done SEO for a living or pay and don’t claim to be an expert. Aaron Wall’s SEO Book is actually on my to-read list, as I want to improve my knowledge now that I’m moving beyond just doing to teaching (that’s the goal here anyway!). In the end, this is the basic stuff I’ve learned online over the years, and it’s worked for me. If more experienced SEO folks want to post suggestions in the comments, they are certainly welcome to!