I get asked this question a lot. “If I want to be on the front page of Google for ‘widgets in Barnet’ then I need to buy www.widgetsinbarnet.com , don’t I?”

Now, there’s a lot of disagreement on the truths and lies about domain weighting – does Google give a higher position to someone with the right domain name? Will you be penalised if you don’t have keywords in your domain name?

All I can tell you is that in my experience:

1) If 2 sites are exactly the same in every way looks wise, same optimisation, same links in etc, and one of them has a keyword rich domain name, then yes, the chances are that Google will prefer them over the site with no keyword rich domain name.

2) If 2 sites looked exactly the same, but only one was optimised, and the other one had the keyword rich domain, 9 times out of 10 in my experience, the properly optimised site would get higher listings.

3) Having a keyword rich domain is only one part of the SEO ‘jigsaw’ – if you don’t have one, don’t worry about it – work on the optimisation of the site that is on the domain name that you DO have, and capitalise on the fact that your domain has been around a while.

I'd love to hear your thoughts below!

It used to be that google preferred the hyphen (-) to the underscore (_) when it came to page names.

So www.yourdomain.com/page-name-here.html was seen more favourably than www.yourdomain.com/page_name_here.html when it came to listings and positioning.

That’s all changed, and now it makes no difference which one you use – Google treats them both the same.

(We’d recommend sticking to one or the other though, rather than mixing them, for the sake of clarity)

For a long time I used Google Analytics to provide webstats for me and for my clients – and it worked. Great stats, pretty graphs, nice figures – everything I needed.The problem I had was that I couldn’t get real time stats – I had to wait until the next day, by which time in some cases it was too late to react to surges in traffic.

I needed something that showed me what my visitors were doing and where they were coming from NOW, not yesterday!

And then I found GetClicky.

As they say about themselves:

Clicky is a web analyzer that works great with any web site, even Ajax and Flash sites. It was originally targeted towards smaller web sites and blogs because it tracks a high level of detail on every visitor, and these types of sites find this information very interesting.

It’s the high level of detail, combined with the fact that I can see what visitors are doing RIGHT NOW that makes GetClicky the perfect stats tool for me.

So what do you get?

The Dashboard:

The dashboard is an overview of the traffic to your site – telling you how mny visitors you’ve had (and showing you trends in a nifty little graph), how many actions those vistors have taken (eg where have they gone in your site), where your visitors have come from, what search phrases they have used and which pages they have visited.As an overview of your traffic, it’s very useful, but it’s in the nitty gritty that getClicky excels, and that’s what’s more exciting to me.

Visitors

The Visitors tab gies you a list of all your recent visitors, and tells you where they came to your site from.You’ll know what time they visited, what their IP address is, how many actions they took on your site, and if the referrer was a search engine, what search phrases they used.

This can be filtered in a number of ways and is very useful information.

Actions

I love the Actions tab as it shows me what each and every visitor has doen on my sites. I can see that one visitor has come to the site from an article that was Stumbled on Stumbleupon, and has not only read that article, but has clicked on the links in it to go to external sites, returned to my site and read some more articles, and even whether they have clicked on an email link to email me. By the time I receive the email I probably already know who they are and what they’ve been looking at and can tailor my reply accordingly – how cool is THAT?

Content

The content tab shows me which pages of my site are being visited, which are the entrance pages, exit pages, which of my files are being downloaded (in my main site, www.nikkipilkington.com, I have PDF versions of my internet marketing articles – this view tells me how many downloads they get every day) and more.

Links

Like most other traffic stats, this tells me where my visitors are coming from. But unlike most other traffic stats, it also shows me which links a visitor is clicking on to LEAVE my site.

This is great – I know whether links in my articles are being visited, recommendations are being followed, links to other sites I own are being clicked – even down to whether someoneclicks on an email link. I can also track visitors that leave to read something I have recommended and then come back! This to me is vital information and one of my favourite GetClicky features.

Searches

The searches tab shows me the latest search phrases I am being fond for on search engines – it’s always interesting to see the searches that bring people to my various sites – intended and unintentional

Spy

This is my favourite GetClicky tab of all.

I can see, in REAL TIME, visitors on my site. I can see which pages they are clicking on, which files they are downloading, external links they are following, and more.

It allows me to react to visitors almost instantly – if I can see that lots of people are on Using Twitter for Business part one on my Business on twitter site, I can quickly amend the page to add a link to other more recent articles I may have written, in order to drive traffic there. If I see that lots of people are clicking on an external link to someone else’s blog, I can make sure I let the blog writer know, and investigate any synergy we may have to exploit the large amounts of traffic.

The spy tab has a multitude of uses – but I wanr you, it’s very addictive

All in all I think GetClicky is as close to perfect as a web stats tool can get.

Pricing?

There is a free service, which doesn’t include the Spy tab, and if you sign up now you’ll get a free 21 day trial of the Premium service, which is what I use. It’s only $60 for the year and you can pay monthly – it’s well worth the investment to have your traffic stats NOW instead of tomorrow.

So, why not given it a go? Sign up now at Get Clicky and let me know how you get on!

Similarly, stop worrying about where your site is hosted.

Some say that it matters, but in my experience it really doesn’t if you’re doing everything else correctly.

OK, if your site isn’t as well optimised as one that’s hosted in the UK, and you’re hosted in the US, you might not get as good results.

But, if your site is well optimised, you’ve done everything right, you’re adding regular new content and getting links in to the site from reputable places, whether you’re hosted in the Uk, US or Outer Mongolia shouldn’t make a difference.

I’ve tested this extensively over the last few years and have not yet failed to get a foreign hosted site on the front page of Google.

Another domain question that pops up with alarming regularity is the ‘location’ question.

Should you have a .com or a .co.uk domain if you’re trying to target the UK market?

Well the simple answer is that, all things being equal, it doesn’t really seem to matter, despite what you may hear or read!

If you have a .com and your site is optimised correctly, you will still achieve good listings in google.co.uk

If you have a .co.uk and your site isn’t optimised at all, the chances are you won’t have any listings in google.co.uk.

The best thing to do? Buy both so no-one else can get them, decide which one you’re going to use and use it as your main domain, housing your site on it and optimising correctly.

A quick insight into the sites I visit on a daily basis:

1) Search Engine Watch – the first site dedicated to search engines, and still the best. Originally started by Danny Sullivan in 1996 (he resigned in 2006), this is a great site to find out the latest search engine stats, search engine news and more.

2) Plurk - a Twitter like site that I’m testing for business use at the moment. It’s a lot easier to follow than twitter (although if you use a twitter app or plugin such as Twhirl or twitterfox then twitter isn’t that hard) and has a funky graphical interface. the downside is that it seems to be the new toy of choice for schoolkids bored in their lessons, so be careful who you approve as a friend! The link is to my personal profile.

3) Ezine Articles – in my opinion this is the best place out there to submit your articles to. It is well respected by Google, and the moderators work hard to keep the rubbish out. It’s easy to submit to, and if your articles happen to be rejected, they’ll always tell you why. If you’re on Twitter, you can follow Ezine Articles Guy here.

4) Ecademy -Please see my updated thoughts on ecademy here

5) SEO Book – with a ton of SEO tools, this site is a must visit for anyone interested in Internet Marketing and SEO. There’s also an e-book written by the founder, and the blog is a must read.

6) Google Analytics Blog – although my website statistics software of choice now tends to be Get Clicky, a lot of my clients (and indeed me) still ahve Analytics in place, so I check in briefly every day to see if there’s anything new on the blog.

7) Matt Cutt’s blog – Google employee Matt Cutts has ong been known as the public face of google for Webmasters and SEO companies alike. He regularly gives out google news, and occasionally hints at things he’s not allowed to (or doesn’t want to!) tell. Well worth checking every day to keep up to speed.

299 Steps To Website Heaven – yes, i know it’s my own site, but I visit it every day, whether to post, to approve comments, or to dig into the archives to find a tip that could help someone.

9) Google Webmaster Tools – whether to check up on clients recent search statistics or to open a new account for a client, Webmaster Tools is an important part of the optimisation process. It gives out a myriad of info about a site, as well as alerting a website owner to errors such as bad links, missing pages and more.

10) Get Clicky – I’m a great fan of Google Analytics, but it has to be said that it is annoying having to wait until the following day to see stats. Get Clicky gives you stats in real time – so you can post a thread somewhere like Ecademy, and within seconds be tracking visitors from that article, to your site, see which pages they look at and where they click to leave.

Nikki Pilkington

www.business-scene.com

Business Scene is a nationwide networking group that hold regular offline meetings as well as having an online presence.

Via the website you can join areas, post classified ads, add articles and more.

You can see my profile at http://www.business-scene.com/view_profile.php?u=NikkiPilkington

Please, please, please, please, please, don’t get hung up on Page Rank.

Most days I receive emails or phone calls from someone saying ‘My Page Rank has dropped – what have I done wrong?’
The chances are, nothing at all!

Page Rank goes up and down, sometimes with no apparent rhyme or reason.

Yes it’s disconcerting, yes it’s a bit of a blow when it happens, but at the end of the day it doesn’t matter.

Are your search engine placements still the same? If yes then what does it matter whether you have a page rank of 1 or page rank of 9?

When all is said and done, if your site is optimised properly and you’re following the tips in this book, your Page Rank isn’t going to make much difference.

Don’t believe me? Go to www.google.co.uk now and search for ‘internet marketing expert’.

See the number one result? That’s me (as of writing). I have a page rank of 3, down from 5 about 6 weeks ago. Yet I’m still number one.

The second result has a PR of 4. The third a PR of 5. Surely if PR held that much weight they should be listed above me?

You may not have been able to get the keyword rich domain name of your choice (and as we’ll discussed elsewhere, that’s not the end of the world), but you can still incorporate your keyphrases into the address of your pages.

For each page of your website, decide the most important phrase, and name the page with that phrase in mind:

- www.mylifecoachingcompany.com/financial-life-coaching.html
- www.accountantsrus.com/accountancy-bedford.html
- www.businessconsultancyexperts.com/small-business-coaching.html

It all counts towards the keyword count when Google comes a calling.

We know it’s all about getting the keywords and phrases into the site wherever and whenever we can, without overdoing it.
One way of adding keywords is to save media files, pdf files, image files etc with keyword rich names.

E.g. www.mysite.com/audio/my-keyphrase.mp3

I’ve been testing this with client websites recently and have seen a definite improvement in results.