Choosing a domain name is important when planning your product launch. There’s a few things on choosing domains for SEO that I’ve already talked about. But the reason I wanted to write this post was the recent EMD update by Google that hunts domains that were created for the sole purpose of getting rankings.

In a nutshell, keyword-stuffed domains is no longer a good practice to achieve higher rankings in Google. Now Google looks at sites with keyword-based domains and tries to understand if these sites were created for the purposes of gaining rankings. Google looks at the quality of content on those sites. If it’s poor, Google penalizes the site by reducing their rankings or removing them from index altogether.

Compete.com, an online research company, has recently published a whitepaper stating that 53% of organic search clicks go to the first organic result. Feel free to download this paper. It presents some interesting results about user’s search behaviour based on their 2mm sample group. Miranda Miller, Compete’s marketing person, posted an article with findings at Search Engines Watch. Make sure you take a look at it for more details.

However, in this post I wanted to summarize some of the most interesting comments from that article. Also, I wanted to share a few resources from that SEO study that Miranda and dweigner, another commenter, shared.

Every year SEOmoz, an authority on SEO, releases search ranking factors report. The report is a composition of data SEO insights and comments for SEO thought leaders. This report is available to anyone who wants to see how search rankings change over time and what’s ahead.

The latest report came out somewhere in May 2011, so there’s hope that the 2012 search ranking report is coming soon. In the meantime I wanted to post about key insights from the last report in simplified terms. These should give you some ideas on things to do to improve your site’s performance in search engines. Here’s the list of things:

There is a lot of SEO tools out there. Choosing the tool depends on a task and a project at hands. You can select SEO tools by task such as keyword research tools. But more often you’d need a tool that can quickly analyze a website for main SEO elements. There’s a number of those too. But this time I’d like to share my experience with Craawler.

Yesterday I started looking at on-page SEO factors affecting rankings for top 5 performers on Google.ca for “calgary web design”. Today we’ll look at the contenders and their on-page SEO elements in more details.

On-page SEO review for top 5 listings

If you simplify things a bit you can divide search engine optimization into two areas: on-page SEO and off-page. By now you and I know that it’s all about the balance between the two and both have to be developed in order for the site to rank high for select queries. Today and over the next 3 days I’ll take a look at an SEO experiment and see how much on-page SEO affects website rankings.

Just checked my rankings for “online marketing Calgary” and noticed a change – got down to #5 from being #2 a couple of weeks ago. Here’s a few first thoughts about what changed:

• The term online marketing Calgary is no longer in my title. Also, this terms is not part of first 3 words of the title. This is likely one of the most important things affecting my ranking.
• My description tag does not work properly for some reason. Looks like Google picks up random text from my homepage, not what I have in the meta description tag. Will look into it right away. My competitors’ descriptions are proper and under the length limit of 150 characters.
• I slowed down on link building recently. My guess is that everybody else have speeded up on it :) or just remained the same.
• I’ve been recently trying to maintain a frequency of new content (once every two days on average). I’m not saying it didn’t contribute to my higher rankings. In fact, I do think that consistent content development contributes to rankings. I’ll have to look more into it and wait.
• It’s worth noting that traffic from Google organic results remained the same as last month and bounce rate dropped significantly.

I’ll keep looking at numbers and will be updating your shortly. Feel free to ask specific questions in comments to this article. Ta-ta!