MakeItYourRing Diamond Engagement Rings: SEO Optimization, Domain Choice, Keyword Research

This is the second in a series of three guest posts by Ron Cripps @AffiliateXFiles explaining his SEO optimization and social media marketing strategies.

What we are going to give to you in this post is a complete breakdown of how we created our site “MakeItYourRing Diamond Engagement Rings” to all the strategies we have used to build long term traffic and hopefully win the ShireeOdiz SEO Idol Competition.

Selecting The MakeItYourRing Diamond Engagement Rings Domain Name

Most of you probably already know how to select a domain name, but this was the first step in launching the site. As I am based in Australia and really like a challenge I thought it only appropriate to hold up the Aussie flag here and go for an Australian domain name.

Google Webmaster Tools report showing increases in traffic (quantity and percentage of increase/decrease) to MakeItYourRing.com.au for each specific keyword phrase.

Many said I was crazy, and still do, but I am a strong believer that you can rank any domain extension with the right marketing mix. That is why I selected www.makeityourring.com.au as it is not too long and it has part of the keyword in the URL which should be enough to get a good listing.

Having your keywords in your URL is one of the strongest ranking factors.

A good rule to stand buy when selecting a domain name is never have more than 20 characters or it becomes hard for others to remember and even harder to brand online.

Selecting The WordPress Theme For MakeItYourRing

As a marketer I always go for the most effective option and that is Studiopress. These WordPress themes are very easy to use and the support forums are the best I have seen. All the themes are constantly updated to reflect many changes online including SEO and have built in functions so you can eliminate many WP Plugins which slow down your blog.

Choosing The Right Keywords For MakeItYourRing

Again this is another process that many of you would be very aware of; however, for those that are not then this might be helpful.

We have used a program called Market Samurai to do
all our keyword research for the last 3 years or so.

Yes, you might be saying right now that there are free keyword tools you can use and you would be right. It is just in my experience I seem to get a better understanding of the keywords and their benefits using this tool.

Market Samurai Keyword Research report showing which keywords Google has equated. You do not have to target them all because Google considers them all the same keyword phrase.

With Market Samurai  you can get as many as 800 keywords listed at one time which makes it much easier to have on your desktop in front of you when writing posts and looking for additional keywords you can add.

Choosing The Content For MakeItYourRing

The content selection was the hardest of all.  I needed quality content that was unique and would actually help the end user to make decisions about buying diamond Jewelry online.

Sounds easy, right? However, not being a diamond jeweler myself I had to rely on other sources to help me write this content. One tool that became very useful through all of this was Jiffy Articles which does not write the articles for you but gives you prompts along the way so you can put together a very informative and unique article very fast. I wrote a guest post here about Jiffy Articles.

Of course it also helps if you have done some research around your selected topic by visiting other websites to see how their articles are structured and get the ideas flowing.

Optimizing The MakeItYourRing Engagement Rings Content

Anyone that has done any form of on-page SEO optimization knows that there are a few elements that are required when optimizing for the search engines.

These on-page factors are:

1. Having your main keyword in the title of the page which should also be your H1 header tag.
2. At a minimum you need at least one H2 tag which also includes your Primary Keyword.
3. You can also use the H3 tag as well if the article length allows it and of course the article still reads well.
4. Using Bold, Italic and Underline properties in your article – again these are only used on your primary keyword.

Awstats server traffic stats from CPanel showing the increase in traffic to MakeItYourRing.com.au from Oct 2011 through part of Dec 2011.

INTERNAL LINKING in MakeItYourRing Diamond Engagement Rings

This next step is very important and must be used for every post you write on your WordPress blog.

Internal linking is what will bind your whole site together and make it much
more user friendly – not only to your site visitors but the search engines as well.

We use two kinds of free WordPress Plugins to do this, SEO Smart Links and IGIT Related Posts With Thumb which places related posts with images beneath each of our posts. This are the WP Plugins we use; however, there are others out there that may be more suitable for you needs.

Google Webmaster Tools >> Your Site On The Web >> Search Queries for MakeItYourRing.com.au for previous 30 days (always 3 days behind)

We use a WordPress Plugin called SEOPressor to do all of our on page optimization. Or you can install a firefox plugin called SEO Doctor to see how your page is performing with SEO if you prefer to make these changes manually yourself.

In the next post in this series, we will be speaking about paid WP plugins that we are using such as CommentLuv Premium, Guest Blogging, and Social Networks and using Article Marketing to build relevant one way back links to our site.

NOTE: See also Ron’s first post in this series about MakeItYourRing Diamond Engagement Rings and the SEO Idol competition.

Tagged as: keyword research, MakeItYourRing Diamond Engagement Rings, Marketing Strategy, SEO / Google / Organic Traffic