Author Archive
Keep it Simple
Posted by: | CommentsWhen I am building a blog or website, I often want to incorporate all of the latest bells and whistles into the site. Flash and slide shows, picture galleries, videos, etc. all intended to maximize the experience of people visiting the site. There are occasions (a lot of occasions), when the best thing to do is keep it simple. I just finished a site at ww.floridakeyselectricalcontractors.com for my newest Business Blog Consulting client. At this time, what they wanted was a simple, professional looking website, that would represent their business well. They had come to me me after a bad experience with another web company. Besides a new website, they also needed me to start developing online marketing strategies to help bring some organic traffic from the search engines to their website. Like a lot of businesses, their existing domain name didn’t offer them any help as far as search engines go. We picked a new domain name to anchor our SEO strategy and then pointed their existing domain name to the site.
In building the site I decided to use the WordPress Twenty Ten theme. This is about as simple as it gets. I added a Contact page, a Services page, and a new Home page. I used the existing About page and added some content about the company. I set the site as a static website, and installed the new Home page. I did a Google search for images about electricians at found three that I thought would work nicely. I took one of them and designed a new header and uploaded it to the site. I took the second image and made a nice Contact widget for the sidebar. I took the third image and used it to fill out the home page and linked it to the Services page.
I spent more time than I should have tinkering with the code to make the nav bar appear to light up when you went to click on a page. I thought this would be a nice touch for an electricians website. This would have probably gone a lot faster if it hadn’t been really late at night while I was tinkering. So, here is the new site for Florida Keys Electrical Contractors:
SEO Experiment Hyphens vs Subdomains Part 1
Posted by: | CommentsI always enjoy doing an SEO experiment here on Blog Consulting. This experiment will actually follow the progress of some websites I am developing for a client. The experiment will attempt to determine if there is a measurable difference between using subdomain sites and sites built on URL’s with a hyphen. The actual experiment will be between miami.skydivingflorida.net (a subdomain site) and skydiving-miami.com (a site with a hyphen in the URL). I have had some success in the past using subdomains when I couldn’t find a decent URL to build a site on. I have stayed away from using domain names with hyphens in them, because somewhere along the line I had read that they had a negative impact on SEO (the reason for this is that there are a lot of spammy sites that are built on domain names with hyphens, however there are also a lot of excellent sites built on hyphenated domain names). Then I watched this video by Matt Cutts who is a lead Google engineer. Watch the short video below:
After watching the video, it looks to me like the hyphen in the domain name is not an issue, so it is a good time to run an experiment and see which type of site works best. I will be careful to build the sites on the same theme and point the same number of links at each site. I will also put the same amount of content on each site (not duplicate content), and I will link to both sites as Miami Skydiving and Skydiving Miami. If the site with the hyphen works for SEO, this will be very helpful when there are not good domain names available for building new sites in competitive keyword areas. I will be building these sites over the next few weeks and will start monitoring their progress. When I have some initial data I will post it here on Blog Consulting.
