Does that sound familiar? Do you celebrate your company name’s top ranking and think that you’re all set? Your website is optimized? You wouldn’t be alone. Too many businesses think coming up #1 in Google for their company name is the ballgame.

But it’s not the ballgame. You certainly want to rank for your company name, but that’s pretty easy to achieve. And the only traffic it will bring you are people who are already familiar with your company.

The real gold is showing up on the first page of Google for terms related to the products and services you sell. These terms will bring you visitors searching for solutions who didn’t even know you existed prior to their search. And the search volume for these terms will be much higher than for your company name. Now, that’s the ballgame.

What about you? Does your company appear on the first page of Google when searching for the important search phrases for your product or service, or only for your company name?

The world of domains is one area where older is better. The longer your domain has been around, the more value it has in the eyes of the search engines.

Now, keep in mind that the search engines incorporate an enormous list of factors in their algorithms that determine search engine rankings, and domain age is just one of them. But it definitely has an effect.

What does this mean for you:

1. Buy your domains as soon as you can. Even if you won’t be ready to build the site for some time. They’ll sit their aging like fine wine and, when you’re ready to build your site, your aged domain will start with value that a brand new domain just won’t have.
2. If you have domains that you’ve bought in the past, it’s best to re-purpose them for other uses rather than let them expire. The older the domain (registration date), the more valuable it is.
3. If you have a site that’s been around a while, it has value even if you’re not seeing much traffic. With some basic web optimization, an older site can really come alive.

My experience has shown that most companies – big and small – don’t utilize even basic web optimization structure and techniques on their websites.  They approach website building from an off-line traditional marketing perspective and don’t have a handle on the differences involved with in online marketing.

My experience was confirmed with a recent  article which reviewed the top 100 fastest growing companies and found that over half (58%) did not employ web optimization practices. Over half! And these are the hot, new, progressive companies. Really stunning. You can read the article here: SEO Basics Overlooked By Fastest Growing Companies

The really, really good news here is that savvy businesses can get a huge leg up on their asleep-at-the-wheel competitors by employing basic, bread and butter web optimization on their websites.