The reason why exact match domains rank so well is because in Google’s view, they look like a branded search. Meaning, whether the domain name is HomeDepot.com versus GardenTools.com, Google does not know the difference between which one is considered a brand and which one is a generic keyword.

Lets go back in time and remember why Google decided to give exact match domains their weight. In the early days of Google, when relevancy was not quite as good as it is now, one of the biggest challenges they had was that people were not finding brands, stores, products when doing a search. When someone typed in “Home Depot” they would probably be presented with websites that were optimized for the brand, SEO sites, competitors, etc., but hardly ever would they come up with the brands actual website. This was a huge relevancy issue that had to be solved.

The solution to this problem was in perfect alignment with cyber-squatting laws. Brand names were winning the good fight in court, and they were getting their domains back. What I believe happened is that Google piggy-backed on this and decided to change their algorithm to include a very simple criteria; when a keyword or phrase was searched, they would add heavy weight to the .com version of the exact match key phrase as it was very likely that the main company that owned the rights to that name owned the website.

Brand relevancy solved! But with every solution there is another problem that comes out of it. In this case, there was no clear separator between a branded search and an exact match search.

So what is the real solution? It is going to be tricky, but I bet they could use a mashup of my ideas below as a starting platform to solve the issue.

1. Create a brand database (a meager of Google Places / Local Business Names / US Business Name search / fictitious name) and dump those into some type of database where they could identify all brand names in the US. Anything in this list will get some type of boost in the .com, .net, .org version) for their keyword search.

2. Create a non-brand list of generic dictionary terms. Sort of risky because a lot of brands are pretty generic on their name and new businesses would not have a chance of ranking, which causes relevancy issues once again.

Google fixing the exact match domain ranking problem is not going away anytime soon, unless they want to critically hurt relevancy for branded search, which would create a bigger problem than they are solving. Domainers – you are good to go now, but knowing Google, problem could be solved in the next few years. Which leads me to the solution for domain owners that have invested thousands or millions in exact-match domains. Make a brand out of them. Register the name, register it in Google places. Don’t give Google a reason to think your domain is a generic keyword trying to get free rankings.

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1. Does the keyword appear in the paid search ad title and description? – This is a no-brainer but often overlooked. They are searching a particular keyword on purpose, make sure you deliver that keyword.

2. Does the ad copy “pre-qualify” clickers? You don’t want ad copy to totally distract visitors, however, you don’t want to falsey drive people into your website as you wont convert them. Try and be both compelling, but also, try and explain what it is you are going to offer them before they click.

3. Does the ad contain a compelling call to action? This is a no-brainer and often overlooked. Put a specific promo in your ad copy like “Free Shipping”, “Free Download”, etc.

4. Is the landing page content relevant to the keyword? This is another often overlooked issue. If someone typed in ‘Purple Widget’ are you selling a purple widget on your landing page? You better be!

5. Does the landing page employ Scenario Design practices to aid user experiences? Is the page usable? Does it have the call to actions necessary to convert a customer?

If you think of all the above items before launching a paid search campaign, and execute on them, your campaign is 300% more likely to be a successful one!

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In many ways, what they have done is good, as it puts the competition on its toes. But I am starting to lose sleep (and I am sure many other are) in the fact that they could turn a switch and be the only business, in business, for many industries. How, you ask?

80% of people find business, ideas, movies, restaurants, plumbers, through the search engines. Google owns almost 70% of the search space. So in essence, they control which sites people go to 55% of the time. They decide where people will go, what companies they will do business with. That is some really crazy power.

What if Google decided that CitySearch was too close of a competitor to Google Local? If they removed them from their index, Citysearch would be impacted to the point that the probably wouldn’t be around in 2 years. Citysearch is not, and never will be a destination website, they are only used when someone needs to find something in a particular city. I would venture to guess that a lions share of their traffic comes from the organic and sponsored results from Google. If Google removed them, Citysearch dies.

Google could do this same thing to many huge online companies. Wikipedia, gone without Google. Local.com, gone without Google. Lending Tree, gone (or at least severely impacted) without Google. I could create a list of thousands of companies, big ones, that would die if Google decided so.

What about retail? I don’t know how you can quantify it in terms of actual dollars, but Google decides where billions of dollars are spent online. With the exception of Amazon and some big offline brands, Google, for the most part, dictates where someone is going to make a purchase. If they decided to form a true competitor to Amazon, they could and within a year in business would probably have the same revenues as Amazon.

This is a monopoly. Quite possibly the biggest monopoly the world has ever seen. A monopoly way beyond a search engine. It is a monopoly on business in general. The government must see it, investors must see it. Google could very easily be a threat to business more than it is an asset.

What would your business do if Google simply did not let you or your competitors compete? I get sick just thinking about that.

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Real-time search means – a message, within seconds, that occurs. When someone tweets, the content of the tweet is real time, the link they submit may not be. If someone posts the following tweet:
“Wow, this new car Tesla put out is amazing! http://bit.ly/12345 ”

The Real time result portion of this article – “Wow, this new car Tesla put out is amazing”

Fresh results means – Fresh results might be news from 4 hours ago, the most recent blog post from your favorite seo consultant, a new car Tesla is launching that they talked about last week. So in the above reference, the link about Tesla may just be a fresh result, certainly not a real time one.

Real Time results are actually a little spammy. They have little value at all as it stands now except for gauging what could be important in real time. So Google or another search engine could use “the real time chatter of twitter” to gauge what is IMPORTANT in real time, not necessarily what IS real time. So, if there was chatter in twitter about Tesla, the importance of seeing the recent news about Tesla would be the real time result, not necessarily the base content of the subject matter.

Check out Danny Sulivans post, it goes really indepth Click Here

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The problem is that there is still a lot of “spam” out there that people need to start controlling. You need to look at twitter as a way that you can mass email all of your followers at once. Knowing that most people follow tens if not hundreds of people, be selective on what you tweet. For me, I ask myself 2 very simple questions before I tweet:

1.
“Why is it that people follow me? Is it my good looks, personality, or my opinion on post-war baseball card collections? Probably not. They are most likely following me because of my knowledge as an SEO consultant, Advertising CEO, or something like that, so I am going to make sure that most my tweets are based around this premise.

2.
“Would I send this message that I am about to tweet out in an email form to everyone in my contact list? Would it have value to them or would I be wasting my time and start losing contacts?”

Stick to posting messages that are based off of why I am following you. Lets all fight to keep spam off the airways. I follow about 100 people, and I really wish it could be highly-valuable content whenever one of those people tweets.

##Danny DeMichele is the CEO of eVisibility.com##

##Misc Danny DeMichele page here##

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I know, we all love Google. I am a HUGE Google lover. I think the issue we face now is too much dominance and while I think that Google is probably better than Bing as far as results go, I will never truly know until I jump in there and try it, without looking back, for 1 month. When you are so used to something, no matter how good other things are, it is hard to make a change. Not seeing the familiar Google layout will take some getting used to, but it is the only way I am ever going to really know if I like something else.

So there it is, as of this moment, I will not use Google until July 4, 2009 in which I will post my notes/feedback on Bing.

##ADDITION TO POST##

Just found this, thought it was interesting and in support of my argument. Techcrunch found that most people prefer the layout of Bing, however, they still wont switch. Goes to show, you are really going to have something substantial to move people away from the familiarity of Google.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/06/25/study-suggests-people-prefer-bings-design-to-googles-but-still-wont-switch/

Click here if you need an internet business start up consultant.

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Being an SEO consultant, the one that annoys me most is search engines. With the success of Google, everyone is on the bandwagon of making a search engine and making everyone rich.

If you want to build a search engine, focus on RESULTS. Don’t worry about things that people don’t care about or need. Everytime I see a new search engine pop up on the radar, that tells me there are a whole bunch of investors who were sold a load of crap and are about to be very disapointed. There are image search engines out there, guess what, Google does it better. There are video searche engines out there, guess what, Google does it better. Bells and whistles are worthless. Google’s dominance is there for only one reason, their results.

You want to build a better search engine? Beat Google in results and visitors will come…it is that simple.

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I had a conversation with some of my co-workers (@ecrunner, @CobraKai817, @imnotadoctor) about my view point and I will admit, I was stumped in some respects. As a result, I decided to open up my mind and try it out. In 3 hours of use, and of course, the install on my iPhone, all of my suspicions were true. I was obsessed with looking at updates, equally (or more so) than my email. I also find myself obsessed with gathering a following, for apparently no reason at all.  I was disappointed to see that most of the tweets are totally useless, a complete waste of my time to even process. I would say 85% is worthless and I just don’t need to see it, 15% actually meant something.

If you are following 50 people, and all 50 of them are tweeting 5 times a day, you have to scan and process 250 of these tweets. That is nuts! How on earth is this not a waste of time? By following them, you have given 50 people full permission to spam you whenever they want, about whatever they want.

Could you imagine if you were getting these in email format? If you were following someone you did not really know, but you were doing so because of their field of expertise, what if this person emailed you to let you know that they were going to bed? Wouldn’t that be a little creepy?

This is what sparked this post. Think before you tweet. There is so much garbage that people are posting that is totally useless information.  Before you tweet, think if you would take this same information and email blast it to all your contacts. Is the information that good?

I do believe twitter cab be truly useful but there must be twitter etiquette. Laws, if you will, that prevent people from posting useless garbage for all your followers to read.

I DONT need to know….
1. When you are leaving the office
2. That you are watching a Laker game
3. You just ate a hamburger
4. You are going to bed
5. THE LIST GOES ON.

What I do want to know about:
1. Something in the news
2. Something related to my field of expertise (or yours, which is why I am following you)
2. If you are in San Francisco, who knows, I may be there.
4. If there is a good band playing in SD
5. THIS LIST ALSO GOES ON.

People just need to think about the effect that their message has on their followers. If you have 300 followers, do really think they all need to know that you are about to go and have dinner with the family? I mean, come on, that takes an awfully large ego to twitter that.

Think before you Tweet.

Now, I am going to log off from my computer and watch TV, but before I do, I better let everyone know, logging on to twitter now….follow that.

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Now, I know I am a mere SEO consultant, however, my opinion is that the internet has to change, there is not choice. Most of the places you go to on a daily basis (news papers, tv, social) does not make money. An economy like this will eat companies like this up and spit them out. Here is a quick breakdown that backs my argument:

Social sites - How long can huge sites (with most of the internet traffic) like facebook, youtube, Myspace, Twitter, etc., keep failing to make a profit? Facebook, which has roughly the same page views monthly as Google, did $437 million in revenue in 2008 compared to Google who did more than $20 Billion in 2008. That is a 40x metric. Guess what audience – you better start clicking on an ad from time to time or prepare to pay for site usage. The bottom line is advertising most likely wont pay off the same way as it has in Search.  When companies start to get bigger, and have to make numbers to appease shareholders, these business models will change. I can guarantee it.

Newspaper sites - Newspapers, which are folding as quickly as a lawn chair factory (that was bad wasn’t it?), are turning to the online ad space, which just doesn’t make money for them. Before they could charge a subscription fee to at least subsidize the cost of delivering the content, no longer will that get that. Further, they received much more money per “view” than their online counterpart. Not sure If you have ever bought media space on a newspaper website, but rarely does the ad payoff. And with the ROI-obsessed online businesses, if it is not paying off quickly, it will be dropped.
    With newspapers going under, so will the very same businesses that have supported these newspapers. Traditional brick and mortar furniture sites, auto dealers and other local companies that used to rely on the local papers wont get the same exposure and will be effected greatly. And I can assure you that the local furniture store does not want to compete with a guy like me, they can’t win. Newspapers had their own eco-system of businesses. When newspapers go away, so will everything down the line.

Etailers – Online retailing has been completely turned over with the growing popularity of comparison-shopping engines. Forget Circuit City and Best Buy being across the street from one another, and have to compete in that way, now consumers can, in 1 minute, search for a product and instantly compare prices against most of the websites online.  This will force online retailers to continue to drive prices down to near-zilch margins and start a cycle of closures in the ecommerce space as well.  As referenced above, traditional retailers are going to have to make some major changes. These guys are going to be competing with ecommerce sites. Great (temporarily) for online retailers, bad for traditional business. And as much as online retailers don’t think they rely on traditional business, they have another thing coming. There is going to be a huge impact from the “out of sight, out of mind” scenario. How many times have you gone to a brick and mortar store, just passing time, saw something you loved, and went ONLINE to read more about it. Nothing will replace seeing and touching a product. For me, almost everything is originated in person, and then I go online to buy it. With this critical missing component to the retail ecosystem, we will all take a hit.

The Internet is going to change; you will have to change to. Get ready, this change is coming much sooner than everyone things. The current economy is forcing all businesses to look at what they do and how it is they make money. Making money is the ONLY thing in business. Stock prices, hype, a good CEO, it doesn’t matter. At the end of the day shareholders need to make money. The only way for shareholders to make money is for stock value to rise. For stock value to rise, the company needs to produce a profit.  These companies will be forced to change, and so will you.

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The data below is calculated very simply: taking the total number of searches using the google keyword tool and the traffic we received from a particular keyword and created a percentage. I took fixed rankings, meaning, there was less than a 2% fluctuation of the ranking in Google during the month, I checked 3 times a day every day:

Experiment #1 -
Domain: eVisibility.com
Search Term: Internet Marketing Company
Position: 1
Total Google Monthly Searches: 8100
Total traffic to eVisibility: 243
Percentage of traffic to eVisibility: 2.9%
Title Tag: Internet Marketing Company – Online Marketing Company – eVisibility

Experiment #2 -
Domain: DannyDeMichele.com
Search Term: Internet Marketing Consultant
Position: 2
Total Google Searches: 6600
Total traffic to domain: 55
Percentage of traffic to Domain: .8%
title tag: SEO Consultant – Danny DeMichele – Internet Marketing Consultant

Experiment #3
Domain: BuyVanitiesOnline.com
Search Term: Bathroom Vanity
Position: #2
Total Google Searches: 110,000
total traffic to domain: 3,446
Percentage of total traffic to domain: 3%
Title Tag: Bathroom Vanities & Bathroom Vanity Cabinets – Free Shipping!

Experiment #4
Domain: buycouchesonline.com
Search Term: couches
Position: #4
Total Google Searches: 60,500
total traffic to domain: 2,091
Percentage of total traffic to domain: 3.4%
Title Tag: Couches & Sofas – Sofas Furniture | Discount Sofas & Couches

Experiment #5
Domain: buyentertainmentcentersonline.com
Search Term: entertainment centers
Position: #13
Total Google Searches: 550,000
total traffic to domain: 123
Percentage of total traffic to domain: 0.02%
Title Tag: Entertainment Centers | Entertainment Center Furniture

Ok – so here are some preliminary findings, again, not conclusive, but a good start.

1. Page 2, what page 2? – the different between a page 2 listing to a page 1 is about 10x difference in traffic. That is a 1000% increase in a mere 5 spots. That is way more than I originally thought.
2. Title tag is everything – you can have #2 spot with a lower traffic than a #3,#4 spot. I know this is something a lot of people pitch that you should do it, not sure how many people actually focus on it.
3.  It appears as e-commerce keywords have a higher click through rate than information/service based words.

eVisibility will be performing an audit on 20 more experimental terms and placements over the next 30 days, be sure to come back and view the results. We will also be testing title tag effectiveness. How much can a great title tag effect click through. 25%? 50% 100%? Hopefully we will know in a month.

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