Making Your Website

Every now and then a client wants to buy three or four or more domain names, and have them all point to a single site. The logic is that each of the domain names would focus on different keywords, and that way they’d rank well for each of them.

For example, if I had a company that made reproduction lamp shades, and my site domain was corieslamps.com, using the strategy above I might be tempted to buy tiffanylampshades.com and artdecolampshades.com and so on, and just redirect them all.

Unfortunately, it just doesn’t work that way. Here’s a post from google on the topic.

Basically it’s saying that having multiple domains won’t help and can actually harm your main site page rankings.

But what if you really want to go after those particular keywords? One options is to make specific pages on your current site that provide information about each of the specialized topics, and make sure those pages are listed in the site map you provide to the engines.

Or, if you have a lot of information on each of the niche topics, you could make minisites for each name, and put all the information there, and then link back to your main site.

Either way, it’s better than risking your current rankings for your primary site, and still lets you provide information on those niche topics.

You want to jump right in on your web site, but a little bit of prep work before you get started is a good thing.

For example, do you know your keywords?  A phrase or two that sums up the purpose of your site, your business or service. “Vacation Rentals Paris” or “Dog Walking Service San Francisco” or “Photography for Second Weddings.”

Make sure you’re clear on a phrase or two before you start writing your content. You don’t want to make your website look like it was written by a robot, but try to use your keywords in the page title, and use them a few times throughout the page.

Knowing your keywords can also help tell you what you shouldn’t spend time on. If you have an idead for an article or post that just doesn’t fit the focus of your site, you may want to consider if it belongs there at all, or if it should be saved for a second web site.

What are good keywords to focus on? You’ll want to find a balance between terms that are completely saturated “web design” is probably too general, yet still make sure people are searching for it.

There are a number of tools that will help you sort the information, but one of the easiest is Google Insights.

It will let you gauge interest in the term over time, narrow the results by location, suggest other related terms, and see top results for the term. All in all, useful information.