How so? You can use the keywords as your site name. Say for instance I sell online Passport photos and buy PassportPhotos.com. I could name my site “Passport Photos” and legitimately ask that my links contain those keywords.

Granted, a lot of my links would be titled PassportPhotos.com, but I would still pick up some of the former. A keyword domain is the cheapest way to get relevant links in the long run.

Like us, our users place a lot of value in speed — that’s why we’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings. We use a variety of sources to determine the speed of a site relative to other sites.

While speed only accounts for a small part of overall rank on Google, it’s still very important. Since people don’t like waiting, increasing your site speed by even half a second can drastically increase your traffic and conversions.

It also means that server load makes more of a difference than ever. If your shared host places too many sites on a server or you’re a stingy dedicated server customer, your site’s ranking on Google could suffer. There has never been a better time to optimize or upgrade your server.

According to a recent study, some sites can increase their traffic by 1% simply by registering “wwwdomain.com” to redirect typo-prone visitors “www.domain.com.”

This may not seem like a lot, but even for a site that gets 1,000 visitors per day, this traffic adds up. Take 10 extra visitors per day and multiply by 365, you get 3650. Assume a domain costs $10 and divide that number of 3650, and you’ll realize that you’re paying less than a quarter of a cent ($0.0027) per visitor!

This is significantly less than the cost of PPC ads, which can run up to $1.00 or more per click. Just remember to redirect the typo domain to your site, otherwise you won’t gain any traffic!

The standard format for a sitemap is XML, which lists the data in a format both browsers and other software can interpret. It is also common to provide an HTML version and possibly even a visual representation for human users who actually want to browse the sitemap. Many times it is useful to users if they have trouble finding something on a site or are not even sure what they want to find.

There are many sitemap generators on the market that automate their creation. Some content management systems also have user-created extensions or plugins for sitemap generators. Furthermore, there are some free sitemap generators on the web, such as XML-Sitemaps.com. These typically also include submission instructions so that you can make your sitemap available through Google.

Photo: Wikipedia

Google will now put a great deal more emphasis on how often your site is updated, how fast it loads, how much time visitors spend on your site, and more. The new algorithm will also display fewer search results, but work at twice the speed as its predecessor.

What does this mean for webmasters? Once the new update is completely launched, you may very well see a change in your site’s Google ranking, for the good or for the bad. The new search is more keyword-relevant and gives preference to new content. This will no doubt benefit bloggers and hurt owners of static HTML sites.

Photo | flaivoloka

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a very profitable niche. Its popularity no doubt was the main reason why the domain sold for so much.

Other recent sales:

npwr.com- $4,000
quizmaker.com- $3,000
enancyagreement.com- £3,500
obese.net- $1,050
buzines.com- €1,000

Source | Domain News

Content management systems like Joomla, provide a solution that works fairly well. Relying on Apache’s mod_rewrite feature, the web server will translate your long URL into something simple that looks like a traditional HTML URL. The SEO theory is that these URLs are friendly to search engines and improve rankings.

Aside from that, a URL that looks like yourdomain.com/somethingelse.html is much more appealing to users, particularly if they want to find that page again and forget to bookmark it. It adds the appearance of permanence to your dynamic pages and will improve your site’s user experience.

The good thing is this usually happens automatically without any need for action on the website owner’s part. Search engines routinely crawl the web looking for new sites to add to their indexes. It’s not unheard of for a new site to be indexed in less than 48 hours. In this day and age, manual submission is obsolete.

Many hosts, however, offer a search engine submission service. Sometimes it’s made available as a free perk for hosting customers, but in most cases, a nominal fee is charged. Features vary from provider to provider, but in general the service submits a URL to several hundred search sites.

Will this boost your site’s traffic? In short, no. While it never hurts for your site to be listed on as many search engines as possible, only three count: Google, Yahoo, and Bing. These are also the sites most likely to find your URL automatically. All other search engines will drive little if any traffic to your site.

Among the keynote speakers this year are: Zane Adam of Microsoft, Antonio Piraino of Tier1 Research, Stephen Cho of Google, Daniel Burton of Salesforce.com, and Emil Sayegh of Mosso. Cloud computing seems to be the hot topic, with many of the keynote speakers focusing on it. Other topics include data protection, SEO, surviving a financial crisis, and virtualization.

Registration is $570 for the full conference with lunch, $415 without lunch, $259 for a single day without lunch, and $71 for exhibits only. Those on a budget can purchase an exhibits only pass and still visit booths, pickup freebies, and network with leading professionals in the industry. There will be over 100 exhibitors this year.

Photo: Flickr

There are a number of tools out there used to track backlinks. They don’t always give the same number. Some over-count and others under-count. Most simply spit out the number of links found by one or more search engines, usually Yahoo, AltaVista, and/or Bing.

My favorite is Backlink Watch. It is different from other link trackers in that it not only tells you the number of links pointing to your site, but also gives you the URL of the first thousand in addition to the PageRank, anchor text, and more.

This information can be a huge asset when selling a domain or assessing one prior to purchase. A seller might claim his name has 500 links pointing to it. But how many sites are they from and how popular are they? Those links could be from one or two forum signatures, one blog, or possibly a melting pot of authority sites.

Similarly, you might be surprised to find out what backlinks the domains you already own have. I recently bought a name without much scrutiny beforehand to find it had links from sites like CNN, The Huffington Post, and ABC News. The seller didn’t know these link existed, either, and gave me a pretty good deal.