Spencer Wolfe

IF you been looking for a domain name recently you will find that anything.com is taken. I found a very interesting article on domain names and what to do with them here.

Domain Names and Anchor Text

May 21, 2004
Branding vs Naming

Many people say that the name of a website should be original. It should convey some sense of branding unlike any other site. They say your name should not be generic.

The truth of this matter is that branding is more developed by how you interact with people than by what your name is. Your name can be used to help develop brand, but many smart webmasters use their domain name for more than just branding.
Superstar Websites

People take the branding idea one step further and rattle off some of the best technological leaders. Amazon, Google, Yahoo!, Ebay, etc. None of these sites say what they do in their site name.

Google is so powerful because it is the only Google. It was a wide open market. Yahoo! became Yahoo! because there was no great well marketed directory on the web. Ebay became Ebay because there was so much market friction in trading junk and they made it easier.
Business Facts

Most successful businesses or websites will not be like Google. Most will not be a runaway technological success. Most businesses become successful from soft innovations. Small focused consumer centric changes can help you craft a successful business model.

For every Yahoo! or Google on the market there are 1,000 Door Hangers.com or Cheese.com websites which are doing just fine “bringing in the cheese.”
Anchor Text

Anchor text is extremely important to search engines. What a link says is as important as who is saying it. When I link to your site with the words “I eat cats” as the link text a search engine will evaluate that link and assume you eat cats.

You can’t control all the links you get (meow), but you can help control some of them. People often link to you using the words in your domain name as the link text (also known as anchor text.) If your domain name has your primary keywords in it then you have an extremely powerful business advantage over your competitors.
Using Dashes in Domain Names

Most of the benefit of dashes in the domain name have eroded in the last year or two. Domain names themselves have been greatly devalued in search engine algorithms, and most links use the site name vice the domain name as the anchor text.

I am of the opinion that you usually can pick out a keyword rich domain name without needing dashes. It may take a bit of creativity and a bit of time, but it is possible. If you are aiming to sell products vice become a consultant you may be able to do well making a living from search engine traffic and not need as strong of a branded name behind your domain.
Brandable Generic Domain Names

Sometimes they do still exist!

I wanted to write an ebook about SEO. Less than a year ago the domain name SEObook.com was still available. It will not always be that easy to find a domain name, but if you think hard enough you should be able to find a brandable domain name which is also keyword rich.

High quality directories usually prefer to list sites by their name vice “insert keyword phrase here.”

Having a domain name like mine makes it very easy for me to get inbound links with “SEO Book” or “Search Engine Optimization Book” as the link text. This allows me to rank better for those search phrases, and eventually it will allow me to rank good for “SEO” and “search engine optimization.”
Creativity in Domain Naming

If the domain name with your keywords is already taken you still have many other options. If my domain name was taken odds are I could have still got a domain name like seo-ebook-book.biz, but that seems a bit too generic and lacks the creativity to keep it somewhat brandable while still making it keyword rich.

Usually you can add other words around the main words in your domain name to keep the keyword rich words in there without making it overly long. TheSEObook.com is one example of an alternate domain I could have used. I could also try synonyms. I just looked and SEOreport.com was gone. My next guess for a name was SEOsecrets.com, and it was still available. There are a ton of good domain names still on the market.
Domain Name Summary

* Search engines such as Google heavily weight link text in their relevancy algorithms.
* Soft innovations drive most successful businesses. It is highly unlikely that my business or your business is going to be the next Google.
* Often times keyword rich domain names are available which will give you a considerable competitive advantage over your competition.

– by Aaron Wall, owner of Search Marketing Info

Having just come back from the California, it is shocking to see things like this happen. This is very interesting political commentary from Chuck Colson. A scary thought to have the United States of America losing it freedom and open society.

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=== BreakPoint with Chuck Colson ===
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Shutting Down Free Speech
The Gay Agenda Triumphant

July 25, 2007

It doesn’t pay to take your constitutional right to free speech seriously anymore — at least, not if you live in Oakland, California. There, a handful of African-American Christian women recently found out that their free speech rights had effectively been outlawed.

The women, who are Oakland government employees, had formed an organization called the Good News Employee Association. As their flyer put it, their group was, “A forum for people of Faith to express their views on the contemporary issues of the day. With Respect for the Natural Family, Marriage, and Family Values.”

As columnist George Will relates, the women posted their flyer after other employee groups, including those advocating gay rights, had advertised their activities on the city’s email system and bulletin board. When Good News asked for equal opportunity, they were told to forget it. City officials destroyed their flyer. They accused the women of Good News of being “determined to promote harassment based on sexual orientation. If the women posted any more flyers, or sent their message via email, the city warned, they would be disciplined and perhaps terminated.

In effect, as Will notes, Oakland “has proscribed any speech that even one person might say questioned the gay rights agenda and therefore created what that person felt was a “hostile environment.” While homosexual rights groups used the city’s email system to advertise “Happy Coming Out Day,” the terms “natural family” and “marriage” and “family values” are considered intolerably inflammatory, he adds.

This is why so-called “hate crimes” laws, like the one being considered by the U.S. Congress, are so dangerous. They can be used as a weapon to censor peaceful political speech that someone doesn’t like. The goal of homosexual groups is not to stop violence, or truly hateful speech; it’s to silence anyone who says that homosexual behavior is a biological disorder or a moral wrong. Mere disagreement is redefined as hate.

The Good News group has gone to court over Oakland’s attack on their First Amendment rights, and the super-liberal Ninth Circuit Court, not surprisingly, has ruled against them. The group now hopes the Supreme Court will intervene.

You and I need to be aware of attempts to encroach on our right to speak out against moral evils. We must also understand that this is ultimately a spiritual battle.

The Bible and natural law teachings tell us that God’s law is written upon our hearts and are known to all. As Christian philosopher J. Budziszewski writes in his book, THE REVENGE OF CONSCIENCE, those who rationalize their sins find it to be so much work that they require other people to support them in it. Society itself must be transformed so that it no longer stands in awful judgment.

This is why gay activist groups want to change the law to suppress any speech that identifies homosexual behavior as either a biological disorder or a moral wrong.

You and I must pray for those who are caught up in homosexuality; their lives are tragic. But we must also remember that, as the Apostle Paul puts it, we must witness to the truth, no matter what human lawmakers say or do, because we owe our ultimate allegiance to the eternal lawgiver: God.

Get links to further information on today’s topic (http://www.breakpoint.org/listingarticle.asp?ID=6787)

The Japanese, Sex And Family

With a topic like sex, I am sure we’ve got your attention. In Japan, sex is a youthful thing. There is really no Judeo-Christian standard of sex being something being saved for marriage. But it is definitely not something two young people do at home. A whole industry sprung up called ‘love hotels’. More appropriately, they should be called sex hotels as they are just designed to give people a room to do something that husbands and wives are usually doing at home.

What has happened a lot in the Japanese society is pre-marital sex has been rampant. Youth have gotten pregnant and gotten married (which is a heck of a lot better than killing the baby through having an abortion which does happen) to take account for their actions. There is some abortion of babies as abortion in Japan is the lazy form of ‘birth-control`.

Once married the young couple ends up raising their children. Traditionally the Japanese wife stays at home with the family while the husband goes to work. Usually, the wife controls the bank account and budgets for the family. Unlike other countries, Japan does not allow joint bank accounts.

As time passes, the parents are focused on their kids but not too much on their relationships with each other. Many times the relationship goes cold as love is something that needs to be cherished and developed. When the children leave the home, the parents don’t have that much to talk about. Divorce in general has been taboo, but with laws are changing where wives can get half of their husbands worth.

In Japan, there are many Japanese married to foreigners. Many Japanese men married to foreign women, and many Japanese women married to western men. In general, ladies from the Philippines are known for looking after their usually aging husbands better than Japanese women. At the same time, American men are known for treating Japanese women better as there is the cultural sense of chivalry that American tend to have. For example, opening the door, walking behind the lady, giving her attention that a Japanese guy would usually not give.

One interesting phenomenon we have seen with many Japanese women married to Westerners is related directly to sex. American couples usually have very active sex lives. However, after a few years of marriage Japanese women tend to start to withhold themselves from their husbands. We have even heard of Japanese wives telling their western husbands if they want to have sex so often then they should ‘get a girlfriend’. How pathetic!

Men have a very strong sex drive and withholding yourself from your husband is very harmful to a marriage and the family as a whole. Of course, if the drive is out of your marriage then you need to do something about it. What can a husband and wife do to make their marriage deeper?

More next entry…