Archive for keyword
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.
Free Blog Consulting Part 9
Posted by: | CommentsI know that I said that Part 8 would probably be the last in this series called Free Blog Consulting, but something happened today that I thought you might be interested in if you have been reading these articles. Today we got our first Google Adsense click on the Cool New Inventions site. If you go back and read the first article in this series you will see how we used keyword research to pick a keyword that got traffic and had some keyword value. We settled on cool inventions and started this site. Today, we are less than a month in on the site and we got a click that was worth $1.23 (One Dollar and twenty-three cents). Here is the report from Google:
Obviously, no one is going to get real excited over $1.23, but the point is that you get to see the process at work. If you were able to get a site that produced enough traffic and enough clicks, you could end up with a pretty decent income stream. What if the site stays about the same and starts getting a steady $1 or $2 dollars a day? Is it worth having? It might be if it doesn’t take a lot of time to maintain. If the site made $45 dollars a month and only took about an hour to maintain every month, it might be worth having. It would take about a month and a half to cover the cost of the domain name and hosting, but then you would have 10 and half months of income or about $500 a year profit for about 10 hours of work. What if you had a hundred sites that produced a $500 dollar a year profit? As long as the 100 sites only needed an hour or less of work a month, then you could effectively make $50,000 a year for about 1000 hours of work. That would be about twenty hours a week, at about fifty dollars an hour. However, there are a lot of ifs, and most people are not willing to do the hard work that would be required to get something like this established. Well, there you go, that will end the Free Blog Consulting series of articles. I hope you find the information useful.
