When you consider that the first impression anybody will see is your website domain name you really need to ask yourself if you are making the most of this element? Does your domain name actually let your visitors know what you have on offer? Of is it too vague and non-descript?

As the internet gets more competitive,  surfers are demanding quicker and quicker response times from the websites they visit and you literally have only a couple of seconds to grab their attention and pull them in.  If your domain name does not relate to the service which you are offering then there is every chance that they will pass you by and move on to the next one on the Google list.

So what can you do?

There are a number of actions you should consider but one of the most important is the use of keywords within your domain name :-
 
Keywords

While there are differing opinions about whether keywords in your domain name will actually make a difference with regards to your search engine listing, it is more the fact that they tell a surfer exactly what you offer.  For example if you were looking for a personal finance site, which one would grab your attention first :-

yourpersonalfinance.com

Or

bandname.com

The chances are that the first domain name will catch your eye first (because it does what it says), and while the use of brand names is a totally different area of the internet, unless your brand name is well known the chances are you will not be as “visible”.

While there are those who disagree that there is any benefit to having keywords in your domain for search engine listing purposes, there is no doubting the power they have over the surfer looking for e.g. personal finance in the example above. 

While we are not saying that a branded domain name and website will not work, it can cost an awful lot of money to ensure that your brand name is visible, well known and actually brings in the traffic. If you are just starting a business why heap added expense on yourself when you can just as well use your domain name to describe your business for a fraction of the cost? 

So are you using your domain name to the full? Does it actually relate to the business you are running?

Link baiting is a good way to get more traffic to your site and in some cases also increase your search engine ranking by increasing the number of links to your site. This is the explanation from Wikipedia:

Link bait is any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything “interesting enough to catch people’s attention.”^[3] Link bait can be an extremely powerful form of marketing as it is viral in nature.

So how do you link bait? Any good resource, article, contest or even tool online can be used to link bait. It just got to be good enough to make people interested.

Tip 1: ABC link baiting

This is actually a kind of fun and easy link bait. Copy the list ABC list from any blog participating like The World According to Xavier, replace the link next to the first letter of your blogs domain name with the name and link to your own blog. If your blog is hosted on for example sampleaddress.com you replace the link next to “S” in the list with a link to your blog at sampleaddress.com.

Then replace the five links at the bottom with five other blogs you would like to invite to participate in this link bait (don’t call it a link bait, because then people may become afraid to participate).

That’s it! Now you just have to wait for someone visiting your blog, copy your link list and cross your fingers that they don’t replace your own link . As long as this list is circling the Internet you will get a lot of links and visitors to your own blog

Tip 2: Spambot trap link bait

Everyone just hate spam so by setting up the spam bot trap from XavierMedia.com you can get people to link to your own site. This little PHP script will simply trick the spam bots (robots searching for email addresses to spam) to harvest a bunch of invalid and fake email addresses. If the spammers get too many invalid email addresses their mailing lists will become completely useless and they have to start all over again. Real people that visit your site will be asked to link to your spam trap page so more and more spam bots will find the page and think they have found the mother load of email addresses. You as the site owner will get more real visitors to your site participating in the war against spam and you will also get more pagerank

Do you got some link baiting tips? Just let me know and maybe, just maybe, I’ll write a few lines about the tip

This months Site of the Month site is a really useful service for all bloggers, everyone with a forum or any other kind of feed people can subscribe to. If you haven’t guessed from the title of this post I’m writing about FeedBurner.com.

FeedBurner.com is mainly used by bloggers who would like to offer their readers a possibility to subscribe to new posts in a feed reader or via email. The easier for your visitors to subscribe to your blog, the more subscribers you will get, the more readers you will get, the more money you will earn . If you ask me FeedBurner.com is doing a good job at letting your visitors subscribe to your blog, just have a look at the link and the form to the left of this post.

For blog owners FeedBurner.com offers a lot of fantastic services like statistics, animated banners with your headlines and many more cool features. The stats can be displayed in many different ways like this picture for example:

You can also get a small button that show your visitors how many subscribers you got:

Some time ago Google acquired FeedBurner.com, but I don’t think that will be any negative at all. Since the Google take over we’ve seen a few new features like AdSense integration in your feed so you can earn even more money from your blog and I think we will see many more cool features in the near future

Check out FeedBurner.com your too.

/Andreas

I’ve installed two plugins to improve this blog.

• Twitter Tools - This tool lets you twitter directly from this blog. Check out the left sidebar of this blog and Twitter all you can Each day a digest of twitters (???) will be posted here in the blog :?) Check out the Xavier Media page at Twitter.com
• Popularity plugin - At the bottom of each post you can now see how popular a post is and you can also find the most popular posts in the sidebar. The more views, posts, trackback etc a post gets the more popular it will become.

If you got a camera to improve your posts (like I wrote in Five things all bloggers need) then you will sooner or later find a jerk or two that’s stealing your work and using it on their own blog/web site. As a blogger you need to protect the content you’ve worked so hard for and you need protect your bandwidth from bandwidth theft. Unfortunately it’s not always so easy, but to protect your pictures from “hotlinkers” (people using content hosted by you as their own without giving you credits) there’s an easy to use way to make their life a little bit harder.

If you’re site is hosted on a Un*x server you can use something called .htaccess to make hotlinking almost impossible. I used this method when Xavier Media had a free Midi file archive at www.xaviermedia.com/midi/ so I know that it’s working

Create a text file called .htaccess.txt using Notes or Wordpad:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+.)?sampleaddress.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/prohibited.jpe [L]

The first line turns the Rewrite Engine so this example will work, the second line will allow your own domain name to link to your pictures and the third line will allow empty referrals. [NC] on the second line means No Case and is used when you need SaMPleAddreSS.com to be the same thing as sampleaddress.com

In the fourth line you set the file extensions you want to rewrite and the image to display instead of the hotlinked images. Please note that the prohibited image is called .jpe instead of .jpeg so it will show in the visitors browser (otherwise you create an infinite loop which will case no image at all to show up ).

If you know the domain names of some bad guys hotlinking to your valuable stuff on your server you can use this code in your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+.)?facebook.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+.)?blogspot.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+.)?myspace.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule .*.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ /images/prohibited.jpe [L]

You can block as many domain names you like. Just make sure you add [NC,OR] at the end of each line except for the last RewriteCond line which should only have [NC] at the end.
When you’ve saved your work simply upload the file to your server (the www directory or maybe the directory where you keep your pictures). If you called your .htaccess file .htaccess.txt you need to rename it to .htaccess when you have uploaded the file to your server.

If you got other files you need to protect this example works with any other file type. I mentioned in the beginning of this post that I used it on midi files