In April 2007, Nominet conducted a survey where they discovered that in the UK people believe that a UK domain name such as .co.uk or .uk.com is more relevant to them than a .com domain. 

In an online survey of 2,324 Internet users, which was carried out for us by YouGov, we also learned that 62% believe a .uk address suggests a company is local or more relevant than a .com, and a third (32%) believe that it is important for international companies to have local domain names in order to attract local customers.

When asked about searching for a particular company on the Internet, 72% said they would visit a .uk web address above any other and only 5% of respondents would try the .com option first.

These findings are significant for anyone that is thinking about buying a domain name and I must admit that my own surfing behaviour backs this up.  The .com domain is relevant to large and international brands and those companies that sell or are marketing information to the US, but if you want people from the UK to visit your site then you are much better off getting a UK domain. 

UK domains are also more likely to rank higher for searches in google.co.uk and yahoo.co.uk for as they are recognised as being from the UK.  The other factor to consider to improve search engine ranking in the UK is ensuring that your website is hosted on servers that are based in the UK.  If you do both these things you are likely to increase your chances of attracting UK searchers. 

Here is an interesting short video that helps to explain SEO (search engine optimisation) for people that aren’t familiar with it.  It’s quite a basic overview but the key messages are content, content, content and getting the right backlinks.

Well, I have just been pottering with my own website and was frustrated because my wordpress google sitemap file wasn’t working properly with my blog, as were are a few other things, but that’s another story… Anyway I discovered this fantastic video from Andre Chaperon from Super Affiliate Marketing without the blah blah that shows people how to get Google to notice you straight away using google’s sitemap generator for Wordpress.   You don’t have to have wordpress to create a sitemap.  You can find a free google sitemap generator , create the sitemap and then upload it to your main directory using ftp (if you don’t have an ftp programme, I usually recommend Core ftp for a good solid free ftp software).  Then following the very clear instructions set out by Andre you can let Google know that you have done it and then just wait for the bots to visit.

Search engine marketing is not the black art that many think it is, but it is a science.  To be successful you need time, a clear keyword strategy linked to well written content, a strong linking strategy, and a socialising strategy.  A good rule of thumb is “first you must give to receive”.  So what does this mean in reality. 

Keyword Strategy

Choosing the right keywords and then optimising your content for those keywords is the key to success, but to get a high ranking for those keywords is an enormous challenge.  For the small business owner, rather than competing with the popular keywords, a better strategy is to go local initially, for example web design sutton, and then optimise your content over time for more keywords where there is less competition.

Articles

It is well known that content is king in terms of improving your search engine ranking so people started churning out articles that were full of optimized key words.  The problem was, they didn’t read well, didn’t really say much, and weren’t adding much value.  Quality articles are now required if you want the articles to be used by other sites.  There are so many free articles out there that only the ones that are well constructed and well written are going to be used.  Copyblogger has a lot of great tips to help you get started and wordtracker can help you choose the high value keyword phrases that you need to optimize in your copy.  If you get this right you are ‘giving’ the reader value in terms of interesting and valuable content and as a result you will ‘receive’ lots of links to your site.

Linking strategy

Many of the free directories require a reciprocal link before agreeing a link to your site.  A clear example of give and receive, but a more interesting way of giving and receiving is through the trackback functionality on blogs.  If give and link to your blog and say something interesting (of value and a unique perspective), chances are you will notice and possibly, if I’m really lucky, link back to me.  That trackback will then link back to my blog post and (hopefully) bring some traffic to my blog .