I would like to take a little more time with you today to talk some more about your selection of your domain name. If you missed the first article, here is the link again. Selecting your Hyperlocal web domain name.
It’s important to select a name in which you will or can dominate the search engines. There are a lot of smart people out there and finding keywords in which you can dominate the SERPS with can be quite difficult. There is good news though, finding a name for your hyperlocal blog and dominating the search engines may not be as hard as you think.
Since I’m writing about my own hyperlocal blog, The Monroe Scoop, I will use it as an example. Type in the phrase: Monroe Scoop into Google and here is what you will see.
What you see is that I have taken the name of my site and dominated the search engines with it. I have the same result in Yahoo.com. I also have the same result at MSN.com.
Ok, let’s look at another example:
This is another hyperlocal blog from Lewisville, N.C. published by my friend Deb Phillips. Lewisville Photos. Lewisville, NC. As you can see, Deb also dominates the search engines with her hyperlocal web domain name. Like my site, Deb’s site is less than a year old and growing. Both of us depend on organic search engine traffic. I have spent very little money marketing my web site thus far. Up until now I have depended on word of mouth, Twitter, blog commenting and search engines for the traffic I receive.
Let me now make the point I am getting at. I market the name of my hyperlocal web site, monroescoop.com. I market the name everywhere possible. It is in my e-mail signatures. I leave business cards at my table in restaurants. Every time I see a bulletin board, I pin up a card. When I mention someone in one of my articles, I e-mail them and tell them about monroescoop.com. When I produce a video, I make sure the name of my site is embedded into the video. Bottom line…I market the name of my site because Google has placed me #1. In my opinion, it’s really that simple.
When I check my stats, the large majority of searches that find my site are simply typing in monroe scoop.
Because of the sheer amount of articles I have written and the various subjects, I rank #1 for many keyword longtail phrases for my community. Most of this is not on purpose. It just happens because I try to write good content. I have about 4 keyword phrases that I do try to SEO but that’s all. Don’t make the mistake of trying to rank for a bunch of phrases. Write naturally and it will happen to you automatically.
- Pick a good hyperlocal web domain name. If it’s a catchy name, that’s great.
- Go out and market the name of your blog.
- Don’t get all caught up going overboard on SEO on your site.
- Write good and various content. You will start ranking high for terms you hadn’t even thought of.
You can do it. Go out and take a #1 spot on Google. If you have done something similar with your blog, please share your success in the comment section below.
Copyright 2009 bloggerlens.com Hyperlocal Blogs & Citizen Journalism
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Hi, Steve — I’ve gotten way behind in my blog reading, so I just now saw this post. You’ve provided some good points, and thanks for giving my blog a shout out.
You are my biggest supporter. I have to give a shout out.
[...] How To Dominate Google With Your Hyperlocal Blog [...]
I have a hyperlocal blog. I thought of it more as just something fun to have, now I see that I can turn it into a really powerful tool for my other businesses.
Jae