It was never easy to get the right web domain name for your business, but these days it’s next to impossible. Just about every word in the English language with a dotcom after it has been taken, mostly by speculators like this kid who buy up hundreds of names and sell them at a huge profit.

There are a couple of ways you can get around this problem, but Catherine Seda, internet marketing expert and author of Pay-Per-Click, a five-hour DVD program on search engine advertising, doesn’t think you should use a dot-biz or dot-us name. “Always go for a dotcom if you’re a business, because people continue to assume dotcom equals a business,” Seda advises. “You’ll miss branding and business potential if you use any other domain extension (sometimes referred to as a domain suffix).”

So what should this reader do since the domain he really wants is taken? Seda advises that he should consider adding a search engine keyword to it. “This can also help your site’s free rankings in the search engines,” Seda explains. “For example, if you own a wedding dress shop and your company’s name is ‘Bella,’ then buy www.BellaWeddingDresses.com.”

OK, but what if there are a gazillion people out there named Bella selling wedding dresses? Now it’s time for some difficult choices. There are three things your website domain name needs to be:

1. It has to be short enough to type so people don’t get writer’s cramp each time they go online looking for you. I have to believe that if I wanted to set up a website with the domain name www.cliffennicotheworldsgreatestsmallbusinesscolumnistwho- yesisalawyerbytrainingbutwhoisareallygreatguyonceyougettoknowhim.com, I wouldn’t have much competition for the name, but most folks would give up looking for me before they would start typing all that.
2. It has to be easy to remember. If you have the choice between www.xtixibieiciir.com and www.cliffsantiques.com, go with the latter.
3. According to Seda (and me), it really has to be a dotcom.

So if your name is Larry, you want to sell bicycles, and www.larrysbicycles.com is already taken as a domain name, how about www.larrythebicycleguy.com or www.larryontwowheels.com? People love it when you throw a little whimsy into your domain name–and that makes it doubly easy to remember.

When all else fails, remember that your domain name (in fact, I would say this is true of your business name as well) doesn’t have to have anything to do with the products or services you’re selling. Think about it:

• What does “Monster.com” have to do with looking for a job online?
• What does “Amazon.com” have to do with buying books and other stuff online?
• What does “Google” or “eBay” or “Little Caesars” have to do with online search, online auctions or pizza?

If you have the choice between a long and convoluted domain name that accurately describes what you do in your business and a name that’s cool and easy to remember but has nothing whatsoever to do with your business, I’d go with the latter if I were you.

One more thing: If your business takes off and becomes successful, it’ll be a lot easier to trademark your name and build a national or international brand around it if it doesn’t describe the business you’re in.

 Let me start by asking you a question: What’s the number-one business killer on the internet? The answer is obvious, but many people miss it. The answer is: not being found on the first page of Google.

I refer to Google often, since the search engine accounts for approximately 50 percent of search traffic. In February 2007, Google sites garnered 47.5 percent of the U.S. search market, with Yahoo! coming in second place at a distant 28.1 percent, according to comScore. Preparing your SEO strategy around Google makes your plan work for other search engines, as well.

Write Away
So what’s the number-one tip for search engine ranking? Articles. With articles, even a brand new domain–some call this the “Google sandbox hell”–can get updated into the search index quickly. Many sites are spidered or crawled, but not indexed, a major problem for new sites.

Let’s first take a look at recent content strategies you can use to write stronger articles. If you’re not familiar with the next wave in quality content scoring and relevancy for search engines, you need to understand a little bit about search engine technology.

Google contains more than 100 algorithms that make it the world’s most popular search engine. One of those is PageRank, a complex voting system I’ll cover in a future article. Another important secret, which has been around for a while, but not utilized by most webmasters, is latent semantic indexing.

“Context” is the new buzzword for SEO in 2007. While you should still write good, natural, user-friendly and relevant web copy, using some simple LSI techniques can elevate your search engine ranking.

When using LSI, engines try to determine what the content or page is about without specifically matching the search term text. It looks at the document collection as a whole and examines which other documents contain some of those same words. In simple terms, this means that as you write and link to and from other pages and sites, search engines using LSI will look at words and phrases that are contextually related and try to figure out what you’re writing about. So, if you’re writing about bait, poles, lures and tackle, you’re probably addressing fishing.

If you want to be ranked higher in the search engines, you should write content and link profiles that have supportive text and anchor text (links) using this “theme” approach. To find related keywords and phrases, use a keyword research tool, like the Google AdWords Keyword Tool. First type in your key terms into the Google search engine and pick the first site that comes up. Then go to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, click the “Site-Related Keywords” tab and paste the URL there. Study the results and use groups of related keywords with links on your page to develop strong on-page factors.

Distributing Your Article
Writing an article that is topically related to your business and then submitting it to article directories like ezinearticles.com, goarticles.com and buzzle.com will pay off big.

Imagine the effect of getting a link from the Los Angeles or New York Times. There isn’t a sure-fire formula for achieving this, but providing quality articles and adding your link in the resources box of the article will allow search engines to find and index you faster. If the content is interesting and newsworthy, the journalists may start calling.

Yes, this could be a lot of work. But one option is to find a service that can distribute your articles for little or no cost. I like isnare.com; for a few dollars you can get your own distribution credits. Once approved, they’ll submit your article to hundreds of directories. Watch your server logs for traffic and spider bots; you’ll see domains and search engine referrers very quickly.

Continue these efforts by writing press releases using similar distribution mechanisms. I use services like prweb.com and marketwire.com. SEO firms have developed a complete marketplace for the SEO compliancy of press releases. They clearly understand the power of submitting and distributing content and press releases. If you don’t know how to write a press release, hire somebody to help you. You can go to sites like elance.com and guru.com to have something written for $50.

If you haven’t pursued these simple tactics for your SEO strategies, you’ve been missing out on important traffic and business. There are a number of resources for traffic acquisition and how-to-books on building an internet presence. Outside of articles, press releases, SEO and pay-per-click, there are social networks, blogs, paid links, affiliate marketing, paid advertising, viral marketing, co-registration and banner ads–certainly enough to keep you busy for a while.

 Any time is a great time to spruce up your Web site. Whether it needs a complete overhaul or just a little tidying up, your site can probably benefit from a thorough going-over.To help you know what to look for, let me tell you about the top four fatal mistakes many designers make with their sites. These mistakes may seem like innocent blunders, but they can really kill your sales. Fortunately, once you know what they are, it’s a small matter to simplify the design of your site to improve its effectiveness and really get your profits soaring.

Remember, if you really want to be successful online, you have to develop a site that serves the needs of your visitors in a user-friendly fashion. It’s surprising how many people don’t think about this when they plan their sites!

An important rule of thumb when it comes to designing a web site is this: Simplify, simplify, simplify. Your site should be easy to use and easy to understand. It should guide visitors through the sales process in a simple and convenient manner. Your visitors should never have to guess at what you mean or what you’re trying to get them to do.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at some of the common mistakes businesses owners make when developing their Web sites.

Fatal Mistake #1: Trying to “dazzle” customers instead of trying to sell to them. A lot of new business owners want their sites to be as eye-catching as possible. They think that by including a lot of flashy graphics and nifty animation effects, they’ll capture their visitors’ attention. That may be true, but these special effects can also distract visitors from what you really want them to focus on: the value of your product.

Never confuse eye-candy with content. Graphics should only ever be used to support the main purpose of your site: to get people to buy what you have to sell. You may want to impress people with your technical know-how by including lots of banners and links on your site, but too much visual clutter looks unprofessional and can ruin your credibility. Anything that distracts visitors from your copy is guaranteed to lose you sales. So if a graphic doesn’t directly relate to your product or service, then it shouldn’t be on your site. It’s just that simple.

You also don’t want to chase your visitors away with long, unnecessary Flash presentations and splash pages. If your customers have to spend too much time trying to figure out how to stop your Flash presentation so they can get through to the “meat” of your site, they’ll be gone, most likely never to return.

Believe it or not, studies have shown that most first-time visitors spend only 10 seconds on a site before deciding whether or not it offers any value for them. You don’t want to waste these precious seconds with a pointless splash page or distracting animation.

The best way to drive sales is to design a simple, clean site using only two or three colors and one or two fonts throughout the entire site. Avoid using colored or patterned backgrounds-you might think they look cool, but they make it really difficult to read your sales copy. Also be sure to keep your link colors and format consistent. People generally expect links to be blue and underlined. This may seem boring from a design point of view, but the links will be instantly recognizable and that’s what really matters.

Fatal Mistake #2: Making your site too large. One of the worst mistakes people can make is building massive, multipaged sites that take forever to load. “The more, the better,” is not the case, at least when it comes to web site design.

Studies have shown that 30 to 60 percent of visitors drop off with each click they’re made to take. Your site has to be as streamlined as possible if you want it to reach its true profit potential.

As you spruce up your site, try to reduce the number of pages wherever possible. If you’re selling 10 or less products, include them on your homepage. Why make visitors click through to a separate “Products” page to see what you have to offer? Remember, every click loses sales! If you can’t feature all your products on your home page, group them in categories and display each category of products on its own page, instead of including a separate page for each product.

Wherever possible, try to reduce the number of files on your web pages. The more files a page has, the longer it’ll take to load-especially if they’re large graphics files. Use colored text instead of graphics to grab attention. If you must use a graphic, make sure it’s a small file. Too many people make the mistake of using high-resolution images when they really don’t need to. You need only 72 dpi (dots per inch) for screen resolution. And most graphics only need to be 256 colors or less.

Don’t forget, you have only 10 seconds to grab people’s attention. The longer visitors have to wait for your site to load, the less likely they are to stick around and find out about your products or services.

Fatal Mistake #3: Designing confusing navigation. Some Web designers like to show off their skills by creating new and different ways to navigate through a multipaged site. Sometimes they hide links beneath icons or images, so that users can’t find the links unless they mouse over the graphics. This may be very clever, but it certainly doesn’t help people find what they’re looking for.

Other designers put their navigation bars in different places on each page of the site, or change the look of the navigation bar itself, which can be awfully confusing. Navigation bars are like traffic signs: They have to be consistent and easily understandable to be effective.

The best way to deal with your navigation is to make it simple and obvious. It might seem boring and unoriginal, but that’s the point. People don’t want to have to spend time figuring out how to make their way through your site-they want it to be easy to understand. Otherwise, they’ll go somewhere else to find what they’re seeking.

Fatal Mistake #4: Burying essential information too deep within the site. Web surfers are impatient people! They don’t want to spend a lot of time trying to find what they’re seeking on your site. According to market research done by the Garner Group, more than 50 percent of all Web sales are lost because site visitors can’t find what they’re looking for.

If you’ve buried important information too deep within your site, you’re losing out on more than half of your sales!

A Web site should be like a newspaper story. All the really important information about your site-what you’re selling and how it benefits people-should be the first thing your visitors see. That’s the best way to capture their attention and get them to read more.

If you have only 10 seconds to grab your visitors’ interest, don’t make them waste time scrolling down your homepage or clicking through to deeper pages. People don’t want to take any extra time to find out what you’re offering-you have to provide it to them right up front. Don’t make them look for it; hit them between the eyes with it!

 In just a few years, blogs have become a phenomenon. Every day, an estimated 175,000 new blogs and more than 1.6 million blog updates go online, according to Technorati, a blog tracking firm. As of late January 2007, Technorati was tracking 63.2 million blogs.This explosive growth raises the question: Should your small business start a blog? I believe you should, if for no other reason than to take advantage of an effective marketing tool. In a recent survey of business technology marketing executives by research firm MarketingSherpa, blogs were voted the No. 4 tool for generating sales leads.

Like any other marketing tool, blogs are most effective when used properly. Here are some suggestions for successful blogging, plus some background for those who aren’t familiar with blogs.

The Backstory on Blogs
The word “blog” is derived from the term “web log.” In essence, a blog is a web page or site that’s part online journal–hence the term “log”–and part open forum. Some bloggers post new updates constantly; others write updates weekly, monthly or only occasionally.

In most cases, blog entries are short and might include photos or links. Sometimes blog readers can post their reactions to the blogger’s entries. Other readers can then add their two cents to those comments, thereby continuing the dialogue.

The so-called blogosphere contains blogs on practically every conceivable topic. Some blogs exist on the website of an individual or business, while others are hosted on public blogging sites, like Blogger and Windows Live Spaces.

Why You Should Consider Blogging
Aside from generating new sales leads, blogging also offers the following potential benefits.

• A blog allows your business to engage with current and potential customers in a direct, informal, no-pressure way. You can communicate the strengths of your product or service, the expertise of your top executives and the breadth of your company’s experience in ways that traditional marketing and advertising don’t allow. This can help engender a better understanding of your company as well as inspire customer loyalty.
• Because of its collaborative nature, a blog can help you gain insight into customers’ needs and interests. You can then use this information to develop new products or services or fine-tune existing ones.
• A blog can make your company appear more “alive” and approachable. A website promoting your products or services is an essential marketing tool. But a blog, in effect, gives your company a personal voice, which also can help boost customer loyalty.
• Blogs cost little, if any, money. Some public blogging sites are free; others charge only nominal fees. Also, blogs are often extremely easy to set up and update, with virtually no training required.

How to Be a Successful Blogger
If you decide a blog makes sense for your business, here are some things you should keep in mind.

• Start by setting goals, policies and tone. Decide what you want to accomplish with your blog and let those goals influence your content. For example, you may want to establish yourself as a “thought leader” in your industry, boost your site’s status in search engine results or differentiate your business from the competition. Also, if your blog will have multiple in-house authors, decide on basic ground rules, such as never trashing the competition. If possible, make a staff member the blog editor to check entries before they’re posted for grammar, typos, tone and consistency.
• Keep it relevant and personal. Blog readers want to know what you–or others in your company–think about the trends relevant to your industry. If you run a local real estate firm, your readers would likely want to know your thoughts on buying and selling trends in your area. Make your entries personal by speaking to readers directly. Tell them a story. Use an authoritative yet conversational and informal voice.
• Make it useful. When you offer helpful tips and links to other resources on the web, your readers will be more inclined to tell others about your blog. For instance, have you read a new book that’s relevant to your readers’ interests? If so, write a short review of that book in your blog. If your blog is an information resource for your industry, other bloggers and website owners will want to link to it. And the more sites that link to your blog, the more likely it will show up near the top of search engine results.
• Use relevant keywords throughout your blog. This is another way to boost your blog’s chances of showing up at or near the top of search engine results.
• Keep readers hungry. If your blog entries are clear, concise and compelling, readers will want to return again and again.
• Use a soft sell. Don’t use your blog to re-purpose press releases, brochures or other content originally created for marketing, PR or advertising. Readers can smell a blatant pitch a mile away.
• Update often. Readers expect blogs to be refreshed regularly. If you update your blog once a month or less, you may not develop a devoted readership. Shorter, more frequent updates are preferable to longer, infrequent ones.
• Consider sharing the duties. Blogging requires a time commitment. Sharing the blogging duties with others in your company can take the pressure off. Plus, multiple voices can make a blog more interesting.
• Stick to it. If you decide to start a blog, make a commitment to keep it going. An abandoned blog won’t give readers a favorable impression of your company.
• Be prepared to evangelize. Because blogging is still relatively new, some stakeholders in your company may be unconvinced of its potential return on investment. Explain how a blog might help your business. Provide examples of blogs you admire and, if possible, how those blogs translated into sales leads, better customer relations or other benefits.
• Consult with trusted advisers. Before embarking on any new marketing initiative, it’s always a good idea to consult with those whose opinion you trust. Do you know a business owner with a business-oriented blog? If so, ask what impact the blog has had on their business. Also ask your in-house or contract marketing expert for input on your blog’s goals, content or tone. Finally, talk to your webmaster, site designer or other web-savvy adviser. Should you add a blog to your small-business website or create one on a separate, public site? What keywords would they recommend using?

Something to Say
Ultimately, a blog can be a highly effective and low-cost marketing tool for differentiating your business from the competition and encouraging customer loyalty. All that’s required to be a successful small business blogger is planning, creativity, commitment and, most importantly, something worth saying.

 We’ve got some big news for you. Brace yourself. There are search options beyond Google–and we’re not talking about Yahoo! and MSN. Vertical search is on the rise, and whether you’re looking for business products, services or information, or a new place to advertise, vertical search sites can benefit your company. Market research firm Outsell predicts that the vertical search market will reach $1 billion by 2009. While Google gets around 65 percent of search traffic today, it doesn’t mean it’s always the best place for your search.“When we speak about an alternative search engine, we’re speaking about something that’s extremely industry-specific, very niche,” says Jason Prescott, the owner of vertical search engine TopTenWholesale.com. “It’s pin-pointing, accurate and only going to be for that topic you’re searching for, [rather than] having to scour through the billions of search results you’ll get on a mainstream, tier-one search engine.”

The same logic applies when determining where to spend your search engine marketing dollars. If you sell a general consumer product, Google may be your best bet. But if you’re looking for highly targeted business purchasers, it may be wise to go vertical. “[You get] a much more relevant user, a much higher conversion and a much better return on your investment,” says Prescott. “User traffic might be a little less, but the visitor is highly more qualified.”

Here are 10 vertical search engines we’ve identified as useful to any business owner. Be sure to research your own industry, however, for more specific verticals that can hone your searches or boost your advertising ROI for business customers.

TopTenWholesale.com:  One of the biggest hurdles for new retailers is finding wholesale merchandise to sell. Prescott aims to place all those product sellers in one place so that when you search for shoes, you receive wholesale results, not Zappos.com. The site also offers news, a blog, directory listings, forums and classifieds, fulfilling Prescott’s goal to create not just a wholesale search site, but a wholesale portal.ThomasNet.com:  ThomasRegister has been a leader in the business information field for more than 100 years, and ThomasNet.com is the place to go if you’re in the market for industrial and manufacturing goods and services. This robust site allows you to search by product/service, company name, brand name, industrial websites or CAD models. You can narrow your search by U.S. state or Canadian province. Browse by category, download 2D and 3D CAD models of mechanical parts, and even download a search plug-in for your Firefox browser.

FindLaw.com:  Both FindLaw.com and Lawyers.com serve the same primary functions: They allow users to search for attorneys by location and specialty. But FindLaw has an easier-to-use interface, making its extra information quicker to find, such as the free form examples, free full-text books and legal dictionary. Both have general search functionality, message boards and blogs, but again FindLaw.com wins us over with its small business section.

USA.gov:  The government has a labyrinthine web of sites, and if you’re looking for information, it’s easy to get lost. This all-things-U.S.-government portal/search engine has a tab specifically for businesses and nonprofits, and you can browse by topic. By far, the most helpful area in the business tab is Get It Done Online, an area with links to business necessities that, yes, you can take care of online.

IT.com:  Rather than offering a plain vanilla directory or just one basic search bar, IT.com provides several tech-oriented search options. This includes product and service categories (enterprise networking, open source, product development) or industry solutions (government, SMB, financial markets). The interface takes non-tech folks into consideration as well; each search choice has a roll-over with an explanation of the terminology. In the main search bar, you can choose to search for news, companies, white papers or webcasts.

Zibb.com:  Reed Business is one of the leading vertical publishers with more than 200 business titles. Zibb.com is the company’s new online venture, a vertical search service for business that offers not only websites and blogs in the results, but also Reed Business content. This site has a strong UK bent to its information, but it’s one to keep an eye on because of its strong news element along with the typical search results and directory listings.

VerticalSearch.com:  VerticalSearch gets super meta as a vertical search engine for vertical sites. The homepage offers pre-determined categories, but you also can choose your own keywords. Results pages offer feeds of headlines and research papers, and you can choose to pull an RSS feed from any search that you choose.

SearchFinance.com:  This site bills itself as the “search engine for financial executives,” making it quite the portal for corporate finance. While search is front-and-center, there are a ton of browsing options: blogs, podcasts, events, webcasts, magazines and alerts. Search results are particularly impressive. Directory matches pop up first, but you can also scroll over the results sources for more information on a particular company and choose to remove any “commercial” sources from your results.

Yahoo! Local:  This site is the most consumer-oriented of the bunch, but a recent redesign with a focus on vertical categories makes it worth a look. Yahoo! Local has broken out of the restaurants-and-nightclubs city guide mold to offer a number of business categories like health and beauty, automotive, and real estate–useful information whether you’re looking for professional service vendors in your neighborhood, a new bistro to take a client to, or a local advertising solution for your business.