I’ll be honest, I wasn’t expecting to get ranked that high in such a short space of time (123-reg is #1 and WebFusion is #2). It’s worth noting that there aren’t any commercial rivals for this search term so both 123-reg’s and WebFusion’s page rank will have helped a lot. 123-reg has a PR of 7 and webFusion 6, which explains why 123-reg is ranked higher

Although this is a really basic test, hopefully it helps to show the importance of each of these basic and controllable web page elements:

• Title tag
• Page URL
• Body text
• PageRank (Number/ quality of links)
• Anchor text

For search terms related to your site it will be very (very) rare to get such dramtic effects so quickly, especially if you are competing with large sites or for a popular search term(e.g. “Shopping U.K”), but by ensuring you have researched and planned all the elements above, you will see your site ranked a lot higher than if you only spend a couple of minutes on them or ignore them altogether.

To research the most popluar keywords and the variations people use surrounding it, the most commonly used tool is http://inventory.overture.com. If you have a Google AdWords, Yahoo Sponsored Search or MSN adCenter account, they also offer keyword list generator tools.

(Why “Monkey shine on tree”? No idea!)

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Monkey Shine on tree
I want to do a test to show how important different elements of a site are when it comes to getting ranked in Google’s natural listings. To do this, I have written the title above (which makes absolutely no sense) to see how long it takes for this post to be ranked and how high up I can get it.

To start with I have used the keywords as the title tag, the page URL and the page’s headline. To help it along, I am now going to start adding keywords into the paragraph so here comes monkey shine and now here we have on tree and to make it interesting let’s put them all together to make monkey shine on tree.

Another factor is a website’s Google PageRank (PR) which uses the number and quality of links to the site as a method of predicting relevancy, so I am going to put this exact post on to our sister site, the WebFusion blog. WebFusion has a PR of 6 compared to 123-reg’s 7, so in theory 123-reg’s should rank higher. I’m also going use the keywords in anchor text linking to WebFusion, and vice versa. So to read exactly the same post on WebFusion click on this link: monkey shine on tree.

Keyword checklist:

• Title tag
• Page URL
• Body text
• PageRank
• Anchor text

Limitations:
Obviously I can’t build the keywords in to the domain name itself, so I can’t demonstrate the importance of that.

A background to “Monkey shine on tree”
The search query at the time of writing has 96,000 results, with the top 3 being:

#1 A Flickr account picture that uses the term and a woman hanging in a tree, with a keyword in a sentance below the picture
#2 A webpage with the keywords in the domain name and a sub-directory along with use of the keywords a lot in the text
#3 An entry on quizilla.com using the keyword in the URL and another in the body of the text

Let’s see how I get on…

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If you went back in time to the internet in 1985, you probably wouldn’t recognise it. At first glance, there wouldn’t be much in common with the mp3′ed up,  socially-networked, anyone-can-have-a-website internet that we know and love today.

But 1985 was an important year, because it’s when .com was born.

Nowadays, we take it for granted. Type in www.thecompanyyouarelookingfor.com and you’ll probably find the business you were after. But pre-1985, .com just didn’t exist.

Short for .commercial, .com was designed to be used by commercial organisations. But there’s been no restriction on who can register .com domains since the mid-1990s. This means they’re now used by all sorts of individuals and organisations, and the name itself is shorthand for the whole internet (when you talk about ‘dotcom companies’, everyone knows what you mean).

I bring this up for no particular reason other than today I spotted a list of the 100 oldest .com domains on the internet, and thought I’d share it. Top of the list is symbolics.com, registered by Symbolics Inc, a computer manufacturer. The next five are:

• bbn.com
• think.com
• mcc.com
• dec.com
• northrop.com

Check out the full list of domains here - or search for a .com domain on 123-reg.

It’s interesting that it took more than two years for the first 100 domains to be registered. I guess things sped up a bit after that, given that there are more than 60 million .com domains in existence today. (Source: Verisign domain name industry brief, August 2007 - PDF, 620KB.)

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