GO.CO Blog http://www.go.co/blog Official Blog of the team behind the .CO domain Fri, 17 May 2013 14:22:00 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5 I Never Wanted to Work for Domain Names http://www.go.co/blog/2013/05/15/will-work-for-domain-names/ http://www.go.co/blog/2013/05/15/will-work-for-domain-names/#comments Wed, 15 May 2013 15:00:04 +0000 Linda Koritkoski http://www.go.co/blog/?p=1917 Have you ever taken a step back to look at your life and been shocked at how you ever got where you are?  That happened to me today and I was amazed at what I found… how in the world did I end up working for domain names? Let me give you a little bit of background: 15 years ago (ish…) I was in college at Syracuse University (let’s go Orange!). If you would have come up to me then and said “Linda, in 15 years you will be the Director of Marketing for a domain extension” – I would have laughed in your face. Really, I would have. No way. First of all, I didn’t even know what a domain extension was.  And second of all, I wanted to make a difference in the world – to “do something that matters”. Working for a domain extension?  I don’t think so! What I didn’t know at the time was just how important domain names would become. I mean, let’s face it, I went to school in the late 90’s… it was the .COM “boom” and there were lots of domain names to be had! The possibilities were endless (as were the VC’s credit lines, apparently)! But today, it’s different. Almost 1.5 decades after the .COM “bust”, we live in a world where almost all of the good .COM’s are taken, and the domain names you want most just aren’t available. Sure, you can add a dash or drop a vowel, but that’s really annoying. Until recently, your only other options would be to mortgage your home, sell your first born child, and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars – or even millions – to buy the perfect .COM domain.  And that’s just plain silly. But just imagine if the Internet was brand new again. If the perfect domain name you wanted for your business, brand or blog was simply available for the asking – and it was as easy to register as a few clicks of the mouse.  Imagine a place where innovation and opportunity thrive, and where passionate people just like you could build the future of the Internet together. The good news is, you don’t have to imagine. With the dawn of “the .CO era”, the Internet is brand new again – and I’m damn proud to be a part of the team that is doing it right this time around.  .CO is more than just a domain name.  We like to think of ourselves as active partners in the success of all of our .CO-ers (hey, I’m a marketer, you know we make up words like that). Whatever it is you are building on .CO, we find ways to support you and to help you to succeed – or to fail fast if that’s your path to eventual success (…but that’s another blog post).  Isn’t it time you got more from your domain extension than a nagging renewal notice once a year?  We think so! There’s no need to settle. Now you can get a domain name that comes with the support of a team that actually cares about you, and provides extra perks and benefits…for free. Just for having the domain name. Seriously. This isn’t bullshit. We’re building a thriving, exciting neighborhood on the Internet – some might say the Brooklyn of the Internet – and we want you to be a part of it. It’s no wonder why I am so excited and proud to be the “Director of Marketing” for .CO – because we aren’t “just a domain name” – we are a community of innovators and entrepreneurs where everyone is building the future of the Internet, and we are stepping into territory that no “domain name” has ventured into ever before. And I love it. But I need help… from you! As lean entrepreneurs, we know that the best input you can get is direct from your customers, so please don’t be shy. Tell me all of it – the good, the bad, the ugly. Are we on the right track? Does this inspire you to build on .CO? What else can we do for you? Tweet us at @dotCO and let our team know. Or if you want to tell me directly, you can shoot me a tweet or DM at @lkoritkoski. I’ll just be here working away at marketing a domain name… who knew?!?

The post I Never Wanted to Work for Domain Names appeared first on GO.CO Blog.

]]> WillWork-610x210-b

Have you ever taken a step back to look at your life and been shocked at how you ever got where you are?  That happened to me today and I was amazed at what I found… how in the world did I end up working for domain names?

Let me give you a little bit of background: 15 years ago (ish…) I was in college at Syracuse University (let’s go Orange!). If you would have come up to me then and said “Linda, in 15 years you will be the Director of Marketing for a domain extension” – I would have laughed in your face. Really, I would have. No way. First of all, I didn’t even know what a domain extension was.  And second of all, I wanted to make a difference in the world – to “do something that matters”. Working for a domain extension?  I don’t think so!

What I didn’t know at the time was just how important domain names would become. I mean, let’s face it, I went to school in the late 90’s… it was the .COM “boom” and there were lots of domain names to be had! The possibilities were endless (as were the VC’s credit lines, apparently)!

But today, it’s different. Almost 1.5 decades after the .COM “bust”, we live in a world where almost all of the good .COM’s are taken, and the domain names you want most just aren’t available. Sure, you can add a dash or drop a vowel, but that’s really annoying. Until recently, your only other options would be to mortgage your home, sell your first born child, and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars – or even millions – to buy the perfect .COM domain.  And that’s just plain silly.

But just imagine if the Internet was brand new again. If the perfect domain name you wanted for your business, brand or blog was simply available for the asking – and it was as easy to register as a few clicks of the mouse.  Imagine a place where innovation and opportunity thrive, and where passionate people just like you could build the future of the Internet together. The good news is, you don’t have to imagine.

With the dawn of “the .CO era”, the Internet is brand new again – and I’m damn proud to be a part of the team that is doing it right this time around.  .CO is more than just a domain name.  We like to think of ourselves as active partners in the success of all of our .CO-ers (hey, I’m a marketer, you know we make up words like that). Whatever it is you are building on .CO, we find ways to support you and to help you to succeed – or to fail fast if that’s your path to eventual success (…but that’s another blog post).  Isn’t it time you got more from your domain extension than a nagging renewal notice once a year?  We think so!

There’s no need to settle. Now you can get a domain name that comes with the support of a team that actually cares about you, and provides extra perks and benefits…for free. Just for having the domain name. Seriously. This isn’t bullshit. We’re building a thriving, exciting neighborhood on the Internet – some might say the Brooklyn of the Internet – and we want you to be a part of it.

It’s no wonder why I am so excited and proud to be the “Director of Marketing” for .CO – because we aren’t “just a domain name” – we are a community of innovators and entrepreneurs where everyone is building the future of the Internet, and we are stepping into territory that no “domain name” has ventured into ever before. And I love it.

But I need help… from you!

As lean entrepreneurs, we know that the best input you can get is direct from your customers, so please don’t be shy. Tell me all of it – the good, the bad, the ugly. Are we on the right track? Does this inspire you to build on .CO? What else can we do for you? Tweet us at @dotCO and let our team know.

Or if you want to tell me directly, you can shoot me a tweet or DM at @lkoritkoski. I’ll just be here working away at marketing a domain name… who knew?!?

The post I Never Wanted to Work for Domain Names appeared first on GO.CO Blog.

]]> http://www.go.co/blog/2013/05/15/will-work-for-domain-names/feed/ 0 SEO in a Week: SEO-Friendly Design & Development http://www.go.co/blog/2013/05/13/seo-friendly-website-design/ http://www.go.co/blog/2013/05/13/seo-friendly-website-design/#comments Mon, 13 May 2013 14:38:03 +0000 Gretchen Erle http://www.go.co/blog/?p=1975 Hey .CO friends—welcome to our SEO in a Week blog post series! We want to provide you with as much information as possible to help you be your SEO best! Today, we will be talking about the various elements of SEO-friendly design and development . It’s important when building a website to ensure that not only will it provide a great experience for your users, but that it also can be easily crawled by search engines as well. After all, what’s the use in having an amazing, well-written, beautifully designed and super-awesome website if search engines aren’t able to access it and index it properly? How Search Engines Work Search engines have automated robots that go about retrieving content which will in turn be stored in a search engine’s index. These automated robots—also called spiders or crawlers—are highly important to your website’s success. If they cannot properly access your website content, then you can’t count on getting any sort of traffic from search engines. Keeping “dibs” on how search engines crawl your site can give you great insight into your site’s health and also allows you to easily diagnose problems. That’s why it is highly recommended to sign up for services like Google Webmaster Tools—where you have access to a plethora of data around how search engines access your site. You can also check on how your site is currently being indexed by performing a “site: search” in Google. Simply type “site:[your site URL]” into the search box. Curious as to how Google treats .CO domains? Read more about SEO and .CO here. Building an SEO-Friendly Website Structure So, what can you do to make sure you’ve got a website that can be easily crawled? In general, there are several guidelines to follow to ensure your site gets crawled correctly. While there are workarounds for many of the obstacles, it is often best to err on the side of caution unless you are extremely in-the-know about how technical SEO works. Place important content in HTML text—Flash files, images and other similar non-text content can cause major obstacles for search engine spiders If content is behind submission required forms, and you want search engines to access it, then make sure there is an alternative way to access those pages, such as from a static link Don’t use frames or i-frames If your site has lots of images and videos, make sure you supplement with relevant and description text Use alt attributes along with your images Do not place your links in images or Flash—make sure your clickable links are formatted in HTML When in doubt, think of it like this—search engine spiders view text best. They have a harder time with images, videos, and other non-text content types. A few more tips to keep in mind: Create an HTML Sitemap page on your site listing all of the important pages on your website Make sure all of the important pages on your site are no further than 3 clicks away from the homepage Meta Tags Meta tags are housed in a website’s code and provide important information for search engines. Here is information on the most common meta tags: Meta descriptions The meta description tag is a very short description of an individual page’s content. This tag does not carry weight in terms of “ranking”—instead, the meta description tag is rendered as the snippet listed on a search engine’s results page, which shows up underneath a page’s title. If there is no meta description tag, then search engines will automatically display a description rendered from other parts of the page. Think of the meta description tag as an advertisement for your site. You want it to entice potential visitors to click through to your site, so make it easy to read, catchy, and relevant.  It is best to keep the meta description relatively short and not to exceed 160 characters. Stay tuned for great tips on crafting SEO-friendly meta descriptions in our upcoming blog post entitled “On Site SEO”. Meta Robots Meta Robots tags can be used to signal to search engine “bots” how you’d like them to access your website. Below are a few of the most important tags. follow/nofollow  signals to search engines if any links on a page should or shouldn’t be crawled. Using “nofollow” will cause a search engine to not acknowledge those links specified. Keep in mind, everything is “followed” by default—you do not need to tell search engines to “follow”. index/noindex using this tag will tell search engines whether you want a page to be crawled and kept in a search engine’s index or not. The “noindex” tag indicates you do not want a page to be included in the search engine’s index. Like the follow/no follow tag, the default state is “index”, so you don’t need to specify that. Meta Keywords Although the Meta keywords tag once was important, it no longer carries any weight whatsoever—and all search engines have announced this fact. Page Titles Page titles, or Title Tags, are the text used to describe a page. It is displayed at the top of a browser bar and shows up in search engine results pages. It is best practice to keep the character limit under 70 characters, and also to include your main keywords as well as your site name. Stay tuned for our “On-Site SEO” post  for a full list of helpful tips on creating great Title Tags. URL Structure URL structure is still very important in the world of SEO and can influence how a search engine ranks a particular page. The way your URL structured can also attract more visitors, social shares, and links back to that particular page. There are several  SEO best practices you should follow when crafting your URLs. Keep them short and to the point Make sure they are user-friendly and crafted intuitively It is best if they are “static” instead of having crazy parameters and non-alphanumeric characters It’s usually best to use hyphens to separate words within the URL instead of underscores or any other character Use relevant keywords, but do not “stuff” the URL full of keywords Redirects When you move a web page from one location to another, it’s important to follow proper redirect best practices. Think about it from a usability perspective as well—where do you want your site visitor to go when he/she clicks on that particular page that is no longer there? Map it to the next best page instead of just 404ing everything Use page-level 301 redirects Do not use 302 redirects—302 redirects signal a temporary move, not a permanent one Sitemap.xml A Sitemap. Xml is a listing of important pages on a website, and is housed at www.example.co/sitemap.xml. It is an important tool you can use to help tell search engines what pages are important on your website. You can create a sitemap.xml in your CMS, hard code it, or use a generator like this one to help you.  Once you have uploaded it to your website, you will also want to submit it in Google Webmaster Tools. The Sitemap.xml topic can be a complex one, so read more about it here. Duplicate Content The topic of duplicate content is a very broad one,  and I recommend you up on all the in’s and out’s. In a nutshell, duplicate content exists when two or more pages exist with the same content. This is seen as bad by Google—and you want to make sure your site does not have duplicate content housed on it, and also that your site does not have content that is taken verbatim from another site. To rectify duplicate content problems on your site, you can use all kinds of methods including the rel=canonical tag, 301 redirects, and many more. Read this excellent SEO Moz post for everything you ever wanted to know about duplicate content. Site Speed and Performance Recently, site speed has become more important in the SEO world. If your website is loading slowly and is cumbersome to open, take a step back and try and diagnose any issues. You can use tools like PageSpeed for Firefox to help you measure your site’s performance and diagnose the problem areas. Wrapping it Up Feeling a bit overwhelmed with what you should do to make sure your site is up to par from a technical standpoint? No problem—bullet points to the rescue! Make sure your site structure is straightforward and easy to navigate Check on how your site is indexed by performing a site:search and by signing up for Google Webmaster Tools Don’t place links in images or Flash—use HTML text Avoid i-frames Use alt attributes to describe your images’ subject matter Create an HTML sitemap Make proper use of meta-tags Ensure your meta-descriptions and page titles adhere to SEO best practices Structure your URLs in a user-friendly manner—short, relevant, and static Use redirects properly Make use of a sitemap.xml Avoid duplicate content Make sure your site isn’t loading too slowly Here at .CO, we wish you nothing but SEO success! If you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed with all of this, take a deep breath and just start making a to-do-list… Rome wasn’t built in a day! Remember to keep coming back every week for more great SEO tips and action items! Also, did you know that you can receive a free personalized SEO Consultation with yours truly? Sign up for our Membership Program to receive all kinds of great perks! And, it’s 100% free! Happy SEO-ing!

The post SEO in a Week: SEO-Friendly Design & Development appeared first on GO.CO Blog.

]]> .CO SEO-Friendly Design & Development

Hey .CO friends—welcome to our SEO in a Week blog post series! We want to provide you with as much information as possible to help you be your SEO best! Today, we will be talking about the various elements of SEO-friendly design and development .

It’s important when building a website to ensure that not only will it provide a great experience for your users, but that it also can be easily crawled by search engines as well. After all, what’s the use in having an amazing, well-written, beautifully designed and super-awesome website if search engines aren’t able to access it and index it properly?

How Search Engines Work

Search engines have automated robots that go about retrieving content which will in turn be stored in a search engine’s index. These automated robots—also called spiders or crawlers—are highly important to your website’s success. If they cannot properly access your website content, then you can’t count on getting any sort of traffic from search engines.

Keeping “dibs” on how search engines crawl your site can give you great insight into your site’s health and also allows you to easily diagnose problems. That’s why it is highly recommended to sign up for services like Google Webmaster Tools—where you have access to a plethora of data around how search engines access your site.

You can also check on how your site is currently being indexed by performing a “site: search” in Google. Simply type “site:[your site URL]” into the search box.

Curious as to how Google treats .CO domains? Read more about SEO and .CO here.

Building an SEO-Friendly Website Structure

So, what can you do to make sure you’ve got a website that can be easily crawled?

In general, there are several guidelines to follow to ensure your site gets crawled correctly. While there are workarounds for many of the obstacles, it is often best to err on the side of caution unless you are extremely in-the-know about how technical SEO works.

  • Place important content in HTML text—Flash files, images and other similar non-text content can cause major obstacles for search engine spiders
  • If content is behind submission required forms, and you want search engines to access it, then make sure there is an alternative way to access those pages, such as from a static link
  • Don’t use frames or i-frames
  • If your site has lots of images and videos, make sure you supplement with relevant and description text
  • Use alt attributes along with your images
  • Do not place your links in images or Flash—make sure your clickable links are formatted in HTML

When in doubt, think of it like this—search engine spiders view text best. They have a harder time with images, videos, and other non-text content types.

A few more tips to keep in mind:

  • Create an HTML Sitemap page on your site listing all of the important pages on your website
  • Make sure all of the important pages on your site are no further than 3 clicks away from the homepage

Meta Tags

Meta tags are housed in a website’s code and provide important information for search engines. Here is information on the most common meta tags:

Meta descriptions
The meta description tag is a very short description of an individual page’s content. This tag does not carry weight in terms of “ranking”—instead, the meta description tag is rendered as the snippet listed on a search engine’s results page, which shows up underneath a page’s title.

If there is no meta description tag, then search engines will automatically display a description rendered from other parts of the page.

Think of the meta description tag as an advertisement for your site. You want it to entice potential visitors to click through to your site, so make it easy to read, catchy, and relevant.  It is best to keep the meta description relatively short and not to exceed 160 characters.

Stay tuned for great tips on crafting SEO-friendly meta descriptions in our upcoming blog post entitled “On Site SEO”.

Meta Robots
Meta Robots tags can be used to signal to search engine “bots” how you’d like them to access your website. Below are a few of the most important tags.

  • follow/nofollow  signals to search engines if any links on a page should or shouldn’t be crawled. Using “nofollow” will cause a search engine to not acknowledge those links specified. Keep in mind, everything is “followed” by default—you do not need to tell search engines to “follow”.
  • index/noindex using this tag will tell search engines whether you want a page to be crawled and kept in a search engine’s index or not. The “noindex” tag indicates you do not want a page to be included in the search engine’s index. Like the follow/no follow tag, the default state is “index”, so you don’t need to specify that.

Meta Keywords
Although the Meta keywords tag once was important, it no longer carries any weight whatsoever—and all search engines have announced this fact.

Page Titles

Page titles, or Title Tags, are the text used to describe a page. It is displayed at the top of a browser bar and shows up in search engine results pages. It is best practice to keep the character limit under 70 characters, and also to include your main keywords as well as your site name. Stay tuned for our “On-Site SEO” post  for a full list of helpful tips on creating great Title Tags.

URL Structure

URL structure is still very important in the world of SEO and can influence how a search engine ranks a particular page. The way your URL structured can also attract more visitors, social shares, and links back to that particular page. There are several  SEO best practices you should follow when crafting your URLs.

  • Keep them short and to the point
  • Make sure they are user-friendly and crafted intuitively
  • It is best if they are “static” instead of having crazy parameters and non-alphanumeric characters
  • It’s usually best to use hyphens to separate words within the URL instead of underscores or any other character
  • Use relevant keywords, but do not “stuff” the URL full of keywords

Redirects

When you move a web page from one location to another, it’s important to follow proper redirect best practices. Think about it from a usability perspective as well—where do you want your site visitor to go when he/she clicks on that particular page that is no longer there?

  • Map it to the next best page instead of just 404ing everything
  • Use page-level 301 redirects
  • Do not use 302 redirects—302 redirects signal a temporary move, not a permanent one

Sitemap.xml

A Sitemap. Xml is a listing of important pages on a website, and is housed at www.example.co/sitemap.xml. It is an important tool you can use to help tell search engines what pages are important on your website. You can create a sitemap.xml in your CMS, hard code it, or use a generator like this one to help you.  Once you have uploaded it to your website, you will also want to submit it in Google Webmaster Tools. The Sitemap.xml topic can be a complex one, so read more about it here.

Duplicate Content

The topic of duplicate content is a very broad one,  and I recommend you up on all the in’s and out’s.

In a nutshell, duplicate content exists when two or more pages exist with the same content. This is seen as bad by Google—and you want to make sure your site does not have duplicate content housed on it, and also that your site does not have content that is taken verbatim from another site. To rectify duplicate content problems on your site, you can use all kinds of methods including the rel=canonical tag, 301 redirects, and many more.

Read this excellent SEO Moz post for everything you ever wanted to know about duplicate content.

Site Speed and Performance

Recently, site speed has become more important in the SEO world. If your website is loading slowly and is cumbersome to open, take a step back and try and diagnose any issues. You can use tools like PageSpeed for Firefox to help you measure your site’s performance and diagnose the problem areas.

Wrapping it Up

Feeling a bit overwhelmed with what you should do to make sure your site is up to par from a technical standpoint? No problem—bullet points to the rescue!

  • Make sure your site structure is straightforward and easy to navigate
  • Check on how your site is indexed by performing a site:search and by signing up for Google Webmaster Tools
  • Don’t place links in images or Flash—use HTML text
  • Avoid i-frames
  • Use alt attributes to describe your images’ subject matter
  • Create an HTML sitemap
  • Make proper use of meta-tags
  • Ensure your meta-descriptions and page titles adhere to SEO best practices
  • Structure your URLs in a user-friendly manner—short, relevant, and static
  • Use redirects properly
  • Make use of a sitemap.xml
  • Avoid duplicate content
  • Make sure your site isn’t loading too slowly

Here at .CO, we wish you nothing but SEO success! If you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed with all of this, take a deep breath and just start making a to-do-list… Rome wasn’t built in a day!

Remember to keep coming back every week for more great SEO tips and action items!

Also, did you know that you can receive a free personalized SEO Consultation with yours truly? Sign up for our Membership Program to receive all kinds of great perks! And, it’s 100% free!

Happy SEO-ing!

The post SEO in a Week: SEO-Friendly Design & Development appeared first on GO.CO Blog.

]]> http://www.go.co/blog/2013/05/13/seo-friendly-website-design/feed/ 1 SEO in a Week: How to Apply Very Basic SEO Best Practices to Your Site http://www.go.co/blog/2013/05/10/seo-in-a-week/ http://www.go.co/blog/2013/05/10/seo-in-a-week/#comments Fri, 10 May 2013 15:02:01 +0000 Gretchen Erle http://www.go.co/blog/?p=1954 Here at .CO, we’re all about SEO — which is why we’ve decided to run a series of blog posts to help educate our .COmmunity on the basics of SEO so that you can apply the most basic of principles to your site. Over the course of the next month, we’ll be giving you handy dandy tips that you can use apply to your site. We’ve broken them down by days of the week, so be sure to check back every week for new tips! Search Engine Optimization (“SEO” for short) is the art and science of driving the most qualified visitors to your website by attaining high search engine results. Whether you’ve only heard the term thrown around, or have attempted to start diving in, the in’s and out’s of SEO can be pretty darn overwhelming. Between the technical components, on-site elements, content, social media aspects, links back to your site and how many never-ending changes search engines are constantly making, it can be pretty intimidating, especially if you don’t have a large team of folks to help you out. Where does one start? Well, just like many other things in life, it helps to break things down into bite-sized chunks. To help you with this, we’ll be writing a new post every Monday with a step-by-step guide to get you started on SEO. The idea is to make them fit in a week for you: set Monday aside for one component, Tuesday for another, and so forth and so on. Before you know it, you’ll have all the basics covered! Since SEO is a never-ending process, our posts will also serve as a little reminder for you. Before we dive into the good stuff, let’s begin by going over the most very basic components of SEO: Monday: Building a search engine friendly website This includes best practices on how to ensure your site is designed in the best possible fashion so that search engines can optimally access your site. This also includes the technical elements of SEO. SEO design & technical best practices are also good for your site visitors. Tuesday: Links back to your site (Coming May 20th) Think of links back to your website as “votes” of confidence. Having links from strong websites is important to build your overall site authority. Wednesday: On-site SEO elements (Coming May 28th) On-site SEO—also called on-page SEO—pertains to elements including the page titles, meta-descriptions and URLs. Thursday: Keyword research and content (Coming June 3rd) Highly important, keyword research describes the process of finding the best keywords to use in your content, links, and on-site elements. By using a variety of tools and turning to the search engines themselves, you can gain insight into how to best reach your target audience. Friday: Social media (Coming June 10th) The same was as general links back to your website count as “votes”, so do social media mentions. You can use social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and others to get the word out about your site. We’ll also be devoting a post to how best to go about tracking your website so that you can keep an eye on everything, check out who’s visiting your site and where they’re coming from, and capitalize on all that helpful info. So, be sure to stop by the .CO blog every Monday for the latest SEO installment. Before you know it, you’ll be fluent in SEO-speak! We also want to remind you that when you join our membership program, you’ll enjoy all kinds of great perks — one of which being a personalized SEO consultation with yours truly!  Being a .CO member gets you all kind of great perks, and it’s 100% free to join! Happy optimizing!  

The post SEO in a Week: How to Apply Very Basic SEO Best Practices to Your Site appeared first on GO.CO Blog.

]]> BLOG-HEADER-SEO-0

Here at .CO, we’re all about SEO — which is why we’ve decided to run a series of blog posts to help educate our .COmmunity on the basics of SEO so that you can apply the most basic of principles to your site.

Over the course of the next month, we’ll be giving you handy dandy tips that you can use apply to your site. We’ve broken them down by days of the week, so be sure to check back every week for new tips!

Search Engine Optimization (“SEO” for short) is the art and science of driving the most qualified visitors to your website by attaining high search engine results.

Whether you’ve only heard the term thrown around, or have attempted to start diving in, the in’s and out’s of SEO can be pretty darn overwhelming.

Between the technical components, on-site elements, content, social media aspects, links back to your site and how many never-ending changes search engines are constantly making, it can be pretty intimidating, especially if you don’t have a large team of folks to help you out.

Where does one start?

Well, just like many other things in life, it helps to break things down into bite-sized chunks. To help you with this, we’ll be writing a new post every Monday with a step-by-step guide to get you started on SEO.

The idea is to make them fit in a week for you: set Monday aside for one component, Tuesday for another, and so forth and so on. Before you know it, you’ll have all the basics covered! Since SEO is a never-ending process, our posts will also serve as a little reminder for you.

Before we dive into the good stuff, let’s begin by going over the most very basic components of SEO:

  • Monday: Building a search engine friendly website
    This includes best practices on how to ensure your site is designed in the best possible fashion so that search engines can optimally access your site. This also includes the technical elements of SEO. SEO design & technical best practices are also good for your site visitors.
  • Tuesday: Links back to your site (Coming May 20th)
    Think of links back to your website as “votes” of confidence. Having links from strong websites is important to build your overall site authority.
  • Wednesday: On-site SEO elements (Coming May 28th)
    On-site SEO—also called on-page SEO—pertains to elements including the page titles, meta-descriptions and URLs.
  • Thursday: Keyword research and content (Coming June 3rd)
    Highly important, keyword research describes the process of finding the best keywords to use in your content, links, and on-site elements. By using a variety of tools and turning to the search engines themselves, you can gain insight into how to best reach your target audience.
  • Friday: Social media (Coming June 10th)
    The same was as general links back to your website count as “votes”, so do social media mentions. You can use social networks like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and others to get the word out about your site.

We’ll also be devoting a post to how best to go about tracking your website so that you can keep an eye on everything, check out who’s visiting your site and where they’re coming from, and capitalize on all that helpful info.

So, be sure to stop by the .CO blog every Monday for the latest SEO installment. Before you know it, you’ll be fluent in SEO-speak!

We also want to remind you that when you join our membership program, you’ll enjoy all kinds of great perks — one of which being a personalized SEO consultation with yours truly!  Being a .CO member gets you all kind of great perks, and it’s 100% free to join!

Happy optimizing!

 

The post SEO in a Week: How to Apply Very Basic SEO Best Practices to Your Site appeared first on GO.CO Blog.

]]> http://www.go.co/blog/2013/05/10/seo-in-a-week/feed/ 0 .COol Things Our Awesome Partners Are Up To This Summer http://www.go.co/blog/2013/05/02/cool-things-our-awesome-partners-are-up-to-this-summer/ http://www.go.co/blog/2013/05/02/cool-things-our-awesome-partners-are-up-to-this-summer/#comments Thu, 02 May 2013 18:36:23 +0000 Ana Sofia Guzman http://www.go.co/blog/?p=1931 As you probably know, we kind of have a love affair with all of our partners—they’re an extension of our .CO family! This summer, they’re planning some pretty cool adventures, of which you can be a part of! Here’s a highlight of some of the things a few of our partners have going on this summer. 500 Startups – If you don’t know them, they’re the most disruptive startup-accelerator yet. With hundreds of experienced startup mentors around the world, a creative workspace in the heart of Silicon Valley, and a vibrant community of startup founders, they help companies succeed in ways other venture firms do not. Mama Bear – A 1-day conference for startups, platforms and though leaders to explore new technology for a market that’s high important (yet underserved)—moms, kids and families. Join key players from Disney to Khan Academy and many others as they discuss strategies, tactics, and case studies for building sustainable companies that solve real problems for families today. We’ll be in Mountain View, CA at Mama Bear on Friday, May 10th and we’re excited to meet the lucky .CO-ers who scored free tickets to Mama Bear through our Membership Program! Geeks on a Plane (GOAP) South East Asia – Geeks on a Plane is an invite-only tour for startups, investors and executives to discover different tech communities around the world. This tour will be traveling across South Asia, stopping in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and Jakarta, and will provide an opportunity to connect with SE Asia’s leading tech communities and influencers. You can read the full agenda here. (The tour leaves June 1st, so if you’re interested in applying, fill out the application here!) Tech Cocktail – Tech Cocktail is a full-fledged media company with thousands of followers and supporters around the world. They started as a simple community-building event and have grown so quickly, even we can’t keep up! The team at Tech Cocktail runs an awesome tech blog, which lives on www.tech.co, and runs hundreds of conferences, festivals and mixers that support entrepreneurs and help them showcase their latest achievements around the world. The good news is you can join them! Check out their agenda here and make sure to check our Membership Program for exclusive tickets to Tech Cocktail’s Mixers! Startup Weekend – If you haven’t already heard of Startup Weekend, you’re in luck! Startup Weekend is an organization that hosts 54-hour events every weekends, bringing together developers, designers, marketers, product managers and startup enthusiasts to share ideas, form teams, and most importantly, launch their own startups! Startup Weekend is going things bigger this year and has an incredible line up of events this summer. Want to take part in a Startup Weekend? If you’re interested in attending, you’re in luck! You can get a free ticket by logging in to our Membership Program. Being a Startup Weekend participant also scores you a free 1-year .CO domain registration to launch your idea on! E27.co – was founded in 2006 and is a media company focused on growing Asia’s technology startup ecosystem. It reports on tech startup news, trends and personalities relevant to startup communities in Asia and also organizes the much-celebrated Echelon conference. Other community events include Founders Drinks, a monthly meetup in several cities around Asia and most recently, Echelon Ignite, a spin-off conference from Echelon to catalyze younger startup communities. Wondering what they’re up to this summer? Echelon 2013. Echelon 2013 will take place in Singapore on June 4-5th and will focus on growing the startup scene locally and issues in the next step of the startup product life cycle. More info here. But, that’s not all – leading up the conference they have 9 satellite events taking place all over Asia, check them out here. As you can see, they’re all pretty awesome and have a lot in store for you this summer! We’ll be back with more highlights from more partners soon… so stay tuned!

The post .COol Things Our Awesome Partners Are Up To This Summer appeared first on GO.CO Blog.

]]> CO PartnersAs you probably know, we kind of have a love affair with all of our partners—they’re an extension of our .CO family! This summer, they’re planning some pretty cool adventures, of which you can be a part of! Here’s a highlight of some of the things a few of our partners have going on this summer.

500 Startups – If you don’t know them, they’re the most disruptive startup-accelerator yet. With hundreds of experienced startup mentors around the world, a creative workspace in the heart of Silicon Valley, and a vibrant community of startup founders, they help companies succeed in ways other venture firms do not.

  • Mama Bear – A 1-day conference for startups, platforms and though leaders to explore new technology for a market that’s high important (yet underserved)—moms, kids and families. Join key players from Disney to Khan Academy and many others as they discuss strategies, tactics, and case studies for building sustainable companies that solve real problems for families today. We’ll be in Mountain View, CA at Mama Bear on Friday, May 10th and we’re excited to meet the lucky .CO-ers who scored free tickets to Mama Bear through our Membership Program!
  • Geeks on a Plane (GOAP) South East Asia – Geeks on a Plane is an invite-only tour for startups, investors and executives to discover different tech communities around the world. This tour will be traveling across South Asia, stopping in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Bangkok, and Jakarta, and will provide an opportunity to connect with SE Asia’s leading tech communities and influencers. You can read the full agenda here. (The tour leaves June 1st, so if you’re interested in applying, fill out the application here!)


Tech Cocktail – Tech Cocktail is a full-fledged media company with thousands of followers and supporters around the world. They started as a simple community-building event and have grown so quickly, even we can’t keep up! The team at Tech Cocktail runs an awesome tech blog, which lives on www.tech.co, and runs hundreds of conferences, festivals and mixers that support entrepreneurs and help them showcase their latest achievements around the world.

The good news is you can join them! Check out their agenda here and make sure to check our Membership Program for exclusive tickets to Tech Cocktail’s Mixers!

Startup Weekend – If you haven’t already heard of Startup Weekend, you’re in luck! Startup Weekend is an organization that hosts 54-hour events every weekends, bringing together developers, designers, marketers, product managers and startup enthusiasts to share ideas, form teams, and most importantly, launch their own startups! Startup Weekend is going things bigger this year and has an incredible line up of events this summer.

Want to take part in a Startup Weekend? If you’re interested in attending, you’re in luck! You can get a free ticket by logging in to our Membership Program. Being a Startup Weekend participant also scores you a free 1-year .CO domain registration to launch your idea on!

E27.co – was founded in 2006 and is a media company focused on growing Asia’s technology startup ecosystem. It reports on tech startup news, trends and personalities relevant to startup communities in Asia and also organizes the much-celebrated Echelon conference. Other community events include Founders Drinks, a monthly meetup in several cities around Asia and most recently, Echelon Ignite, a spin-off conference from Echelon to catalyze younger startup communities.

Wondering what they’re up to this summer? Echelon 2013. Echelon 2013 will take place in Singapore on June 4-5th and will focus on growing the startup scene locally and issues in the next step of the startup product life cycle. More info here. But, that’s not all – leading up the conference they have 9 satellite events taking place all over Asia, check them out here.

As you can see, they’re all pretty awesome and have a lot in store for you this summer! We’ll be back with more highlights from more partners soon… so stay tuned!

The post .COol Things Our Awesome Partners Are Up To This Summer appeared first on GO.CO Blog.

]]> http://www.go.co/blog/2013/05/02/cool-things-our-awesome-partners-are-up-to-this-summer/feed/ 0 Going Above and Beyond the Booth http://www.go.co/blog/2013/04/25/going-above-and-beyond-the-booth/ http://www.go.co/blog/2013/04/25/going-above-and-beyond-the-booth/#comments Thu, 25 Apr 2013 19:00:27 +0000 Crystal Peterson http://www.go.co/blog/?p=1885 We all know events require a lot of work.  With the heavy event season now over for the first quarter, we’ve picked up a few tips and tricks from the variety of events we attended while achieving 1,500,000 domains in our spare time. From startup world happenings like Startup Weekend and 500 Startups demo days to channel events such as World Hosting Days and ICANN, here are several tips we’ve compiled from our experiences to help you make the most of your next event! Capture the crowd Consider what would be useful and appealing to the attendees so you can be sure to select the right giveaways, create a meaningful social strategy and grab their attention. Nothing beats a quality giveaway that’s useful to your audience – it’s assurance that the item will live on beyond the event! (And that means a small piece of your brand will travel home) Pump up the energy Don’t be ”that person” who’s sitting behind the table at a fantastic booth twiddling thumbs and yawning. Don’t make yourself unapproachable by looking uninterested – instead, bring your best and brightest energy with you (even if it requires a shot – or three – of espresso). Keep the energy high and plan to engage as many people as possible. After all, this is your chance to make your brand shine while you’re face-to-face with current or potential customers! Get Social with social media You go to industry events to interact with people and represent your brand in a high-touch way but why not extend the relationships you’re sparking up at your booth? Encourage the people you meet to have some fun with you on the social media front. Urge them to take pictures to share with a specific hashtag, tweet at you or any other clever social tie in that will allow you to later follow up. Maybe in order to get one of the great premium items you’re giving away they have to take a photo with the item and tweet it at you. You’ll be surprised how many people are eager to interact with you beyond the booth (especially if a cool and meaningful giveaway is involved)! We hope these tips come in handy as you plan future events! If you’d like to see some of these tips in action, check out our South By Southwest 2013 Photo Diary Recap… or keep up with us on Twitter to meet us at a future event!

The post Going Above and Beyond the Booth appeared first on GO.CO Blog.

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We all know events require a lot of work.  With the heavy event season now over for the first quarter, we’ve picked up a few tips and tricks from the variety of events we attended while achieving 1,500,000 domains in our spare time. From startup world happenings like Startup Weekend and 500 Startups demo days to channel events such as World Hosting Days and ICANN, here are several tips we’ve compiled from our experiences to help you make the most of your next event!

Capture the crowd
Consider what would be useful and appealing to the attendees so you can be sure to select the right giveaways, create a meaningful social strategy and grab their attention. Nothing beats a quality giveaway that’s useful to your audience – it’s assurance that the item will live on beyond the event! (And that means a small piece of your brand will travel home)

Pump up the energy
Don’t be ”that person” who’s sitting behind the table at a fantastic booth twiddling thumbs and yawning. Don’t make yourself unapproachable by looking uninterested – instead, bring your best and brightest energy with you (even if it requires a shot – or three – of espresso). Keep the energy high and plan to engage as many people as possible. After all, this is your chance to make your brand shine while you’re face-to-face with current or potential customers!

Get Social with social media
You go to industry events to interact with people and represent your brand in a high-touch way but why not extend the relationships you’re sparking up at your booth? Encourage the people you meet to have some fun with you on the social media front. Urge them to take pictures to share with a specific hashtag, tweet at you or any other clever social tie in that will allow you to later follow up. Maybe in order to get one of the great premium items you’re giving away they have to take a photo with the item and tweet it at you. You’ll be surprised how many people are eager to interact with you beyond the booth (especially if a cool and meaningful giveaway is involved)!

We hope these tips come in handy as you plan future events! If you’d like to see some of these tips in action, check out our South By Southwest 2013 Photo Diary Recap… or keep up with us on Twitter to meet us at a future event!

The post Going Above and Beyond the Booth appeared first on GO.CO Blog.

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