In this post, I’m only going to talk about personal projects and how I use domains to not only promote them but also to spark ideas for me on what projects to take on.

Any personal project I take on is about development, not investment. There is a whole industry around domain investing (website properties investing too) but that isn’t what I’m really about. Sure, I’ve purchased domains over the years just because I believed they would increase in value and I’d eventually be able to flip them for a profit, but that’s not fun for me nor something I’ve done often–and rarely do at all anymore.

I’ve long reached that point in my career, life, and business where I can afford to be selective in what I get involved in, and take on a bit more risk to pick the projects that I find interesting over just doing what is most likely to be profitable.

The funny thing is, I’ve found greater rewards financially and personally approaching projects this way, so hopefully, I can share a bit of insight that’s helpful.

Speaking of helpful, this brings me to what type of projects I look for to get involved with. If I’m going to develop something it has to accomplish two things:

• It has to be interesting to me. If I don’t have some personal interest in the topic of the site, or the tech required to create and run the site, then I’m a hard pass.
• It has to be something that will be useful and/or helpful to users once completed.

Notice neither of those things takes into account “profits”. Here’s something I’ve learned after 20+ years of building websites and doing business online: if you help people you will profit.

That may sound a little abstract or “pie in the sky”, but it’s true. Any website, or web page, that gets traffic can be monetized. There are no secrets or hidden formulas to it (sorry to all the “make money online” gurus trying to sell their courses), if you have an audience you can earn from that traffic, period. How you earn from it is a choice, again there are no secrets here, display advertising, sell your own product, promote affiliate products, offer a service. That’s it.

Project Domain Names

Now that I’ve gone on and on about how I decide on projects to take on for myself let me explain how I use domains, or more accurately how I pick domains for projects (and sometimes pick projects for domains).

Let’s imagine I’ve decided that I want to build a resource site for canary owners. Maybe I’m a bird lover so passionate about the topic, and I’ve found there’s a lacking of good information, or at least of having all the good information in a single easy to use place, so that’s my project: a website of resources for canary owners or anyone thinking of getting canaries.

I wouldn’t build a project like this without having something new to add to it, just curating content from around the web and turning it into resource pages on your own site is boring, so let’s also assume I’ve got an idea for some tool, maybe an app that helps with tracking the specific daily-changing feeding needs for canaries or something, the point is I’ve got something new and helpful to add that will make my site more than just a culling of already available information.

So, I’ve got the project idea ready, it meets both of my criteria as I’m passionate about the topic and I’ve got something to add that will be useful and helpful to others. Now I’m going to need a domain name for it.

Obviously, Canary.com or Canaries.com would be perfect but it isn’t 1995 anymore so surely they’re both owned and going to be too pricey (if available for sale) for a project like this.

Top-level premium domains like that are nearly impossible for the average person to acquire. They’re rare and expensive. But, there are still tons of good domains out there which can carry some weight as defining your category or niche by sounding like the authority domain for it.

In the past I’ve scoured expired domain listings, GoDaddy auctions, and etc., to find good domains for projects, but in the past year or so I’ve shifted away from that laborious (and more costly) method after building a tool right here on this site that pairs your keyword with tons of popular and generic terms to find available domains in seconds.

Depending on the category or niche I sometimes have to try with 2 or 3 keywords (i.e. canary, canaries) before finding something that is just right and sounds authoritative, but with so many options being checked it usually works on the first search.

For this example of my canary resource site I just went to the Leap Domain Name Generator page, typed “canary” into the keywords input box, and pressed “Search”. In seconds I had a bunch of available 2-word domain name options to pick from.

Of course, not all of them are perfect for this project (i.e. CookCanary.com or CrunchCanary.com), and some don’t make any sense at all (MegaCanary.com), but there were a few that were close. I mean if I were targeting beginner bird owners then FirstCanary.com would be perfect, and for bird owners of any level looking to get a canary then NewCanary.com is a great fit, but neither was “just right” to me, but then I saw this one and it would be my choice for the project in this example: HealthyCanary.com

It fits the project, being about resources for canary owners much of the site will be about keeping your canary happy and healthy, plus the “app” for tracking your canary’s dietary needs is spot-on with the domain, and finally, if someone tells you “visit HealthyCanary.com” you’re going to instantly think that domain is for an authority website about healthy canaries.

In case you’re wondering how this would work with something more popular and searched for online than canaries (though canary and canaries are both high-volume keywords), using the Leap Domain Name Generator I typed in “CSS” and found ChatCSS.com and CSSMagazine.com right at the top which would both make for great domains on a site devoted to CSS.

When I Have No Project In Mind

I wanted to mention this because sometimes I have time and the desire to start a project, but no specific project in mind. Here is where the domain name tool really shines and helps me out.

I just go and pop in some generic terms, nothing category or niche-specific, and let the tool spit out tons of generic combinations that I’ll look over until something “pops” for me, sparking my interest and ideas for how I could develop a useful and helpful product for end-users.

As an example, I just now typed in “developing”, a pretty generic term and fitting my little blog here, and one of the first results I got was GeoDeveloping.com. What a great domain for someone with an interest in developing Geo domains, or maybe for a coder who can create a tool that helps in the development of Geo domains. All kinds of ideas here that would fit my personal criteria and could spark a great project.

Next, I put in “creators” since being an online creator is a good broad topic these days, and right off there’s CreatorsChat.com and GeoCreators.com. Either could make a strong authority site in several ways.

So you see, by just putting in broad or generic keywords and letting the generator pair them up with other broad and common prefixes and suffixes, it’s easy to come up with strong (and available) domains for projects.

BONUS: What To Do With These Little Projects Once They’re Done

Personally, when I build up projects I hold onto them. To me, it’s investing in myself. But I know a lot of developers want to build and then flip their projects for profits, which is a great way of turning your passion for developing into income.

There are marketplaces that do well for selling projects once they’re up and running. Flippa is one of the most well-known. My experience there is that you’ll do best if your project already has steady traffic and revenue flows, so if you’re willing to grow those between completing the build and selling then it’s a good marketplace for you.

If you’re looking for quick sales as soon as your projects are built and ready for traffic, there is a newer marketplace especially for connecting developers with “ready projects” and aspiring business owners together called Tiny Acquisitions that you may want to look into.

Basically, it’s a marketplace where sellers are creators or developers who build their project ideas, and then sell the completed project to buyers who are looking for business opportunities to make profitable or grow.

I haven’t used this platform myself, like I said I hold onto my projects for the long rewards, but I think it’s a great idea for getting developers and the business-minded together, letting creators get a quick exit once their idea has been brought to life and giving business owners the opportunity to grab something at the bottom level and grow it.

NOTE: I’ve mentioned a lot of available domain names in this posting, all being available at the time I’m writing this. Please feel free to register any that sparked your own imagination with ideas, and please understand that any or all of them may have been registered by others between the time I publish this and you read it.

How do you find domain names to develop your projects on? I’d love to hear in the comments below.

A CSS reset has never been needed, so the short answer here is no.

However, a simple CSS reset will help to make your project easier to keep uniform or close to it across all browsers and devices, so while not needed it’s pretty handy to have.

Is it Even Good to Reset CSS?

This often depends on who you’re talking to, some have pretty strong feelings on the topic of resets. It’s also dependent on the situation, not every project is going to need a reset, for example, if you’re building a one-page lander it’s overkill to include a reset or normalize to the code.

What’s the Best CSS Reset?

This is another subjective question and a lot of designers will answer it based on some affinity they have for a specific reset library or reset creator.

My thoughts here is that the reset which does what the designer needs it to in the least amount of code is the best one for the job.

CSS vs. Normalize

I was reluctant to include this because it isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison. The fact is a CSS reset is designed to remove built-in browser styling, where Normalize was made to instead make the built-in browser styling more consistent from browser to browser.

For me personally, a reset is always easier and better than trying to normalize.

What’s the Difference Between Resetting and Normalizing CSS?

A CSS reset simply strips away the built-in browser stylings and lets the designer/developer apply the rules their project needs, as needed, to all browsers and devices.

On the other hand, Normalize works by fighting with all browsers, bending them to its will in order to “normalize” behaviors. This adds lines and layers of code and styles overwriting the built-in browser styles. More bloat and more processing.

Why Would You Use Normalize?

I wouldn’t, as described above I’d rather make elements uniform across browsers by simply stripping their built-in styling with a short reset then declaring the rules I want for the element in my CSS, which will then apply on any browser or device, than use a ton of code to fight various browsers and beat them into submission to do the same thing.

What I Use to Reset CSS

This is a very minimal CSS Reset, and while there are some minor differences that can appear across browsers with this, they’re rare and obscure at this point with most modern browsers being fairly uninformed it’s just better to tweak for a specific oddity if needed than have a huge and wasteful reset adding to the bloat of your CSS.

html { box-sizing: border-box; }

*, *:before, *:after { box-sizing: inherit; }

body, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, ol, ul {
  font-weight: normal;
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0; }

ol, ul { list-style: none; }

img {
  height: auto;
  max-width: 100%; }

How’s that for simple and direct?

You’ll notice right off that I don’t specify a font-size in the html, *, root, or body rules. I do this for mobile and more importantly, accessibility. From then on in my CSS all font sizing will be handled with proportional rem declarations, allowing the user’s device (and needs) to dictate.

I typically like to style my ol’s and ul’s myself rather than use the default bullet-points and padding, but if you prefer the defaults that’s one more line you can remove from this tiny reset.

You’ll notice I added an img rule with height: auto; and max-width: 100%; This is going to give any images I use on the site a generic responsiveness by default, though I’ll almost assuredly be adding PureCSS after my tiny reset which comes with the .pure-img class that will handle that better.

Speaking of PureCSS, it’s a minimal library of style modules that gives you a foundation for quickly producing a design layout with ease, much like Bootstrap does only without the bloated CSS code and with no JavaScript. Then you tweak and adjust the fine-tuning of specific elements for your design, rather than having a ton of unused and unnecessary CSS rules in your code that only exist for “might use” cases.

PureCSS does suggest using Normalize.CSS and including it before you bring in the PureCSS styles of your web page, however, I just use the tiny reset above instead. My thoughts on Normalize and why I don’t do it are already detailed above.

When minified (as your CSS always should be) and compressed before serving with gzip, PureCSS comes in at under 4kb in file size.

This is what I’m using for my projects at this time, and my client’s projects as well. What are you doing with yours? Tell me in the comments below I’d love to hear different ideas and methods.

My intention starting out was to run the speed test, probably switch out a couple of plugins, maybe add a tiny bit of tweaking to the custom theme I had already, and call it a day. Maybe an hour of time, no big deal, right? But then I saw the results of my test and soon realized I needed to dive deep into WordPress speed optimization techniques here.

Realizing what a major revamping of the site this was going to be, I decided to document what I did and hopefully help a few others out there who might be in the same position.

The Theme

The first step was to drop the theme I was using. It was a custom theme, actually a custom child theme of the Ascend theme from Kadence Themes, and while I like the appearance, I knew I could get close with a whole lot less bloat in the theme and CSS files.

Not long ago I created a minimalist theme for WordPress based on the PureCSS libraries from Yahoo!, so I uploaded this theme and dropped my Ascend child theme. I deleted Ascend and the child theme I had created from it, because you really shouldn’t keep old themes on your site and there was no way I’d be going backward here, so, didn’t need them.

I love PureCSS and favor it over Bootstrap (oh so bulky and full of bloat) yet can still put a design or WP theme layout together using PureCSS in minutes, then just spend a little time on the fine-tuning details and call it done. The theme I created and am using on this site now took me less than an hour to create.

If there is interest in my PureCSS theme let me know in the comments, I’ll be happy to make it available here.

There were some minor fixes necessary when I changed the theme, primarily with the main page since my PureCSS theme doesn’t have the nifty layout options for the front page that Ascend had come with, fortunately, WordPress itself had my back.

With the latest WordPress release, the editor blocks have been expanded and all I needed to do to recreate my front page layout of before was to create an actual Home page in my dashboard, add 2 Recent Posts blocks to it, one for the latest feature story and one for the most recent blogs (Musings I call them), then go to my Reading settings in the dashboard and set this new Home page to be the front page display of my site.

Next up, Plugins!

I had a whopping 24 plugins installed on the site, though in fairness a majority of them are back-end and dashboard related for security and content creation helpers, but still I thought I could do better than 24, not to mention there were a few plugins missing that I’ve taken to using lately, so the goal here was to add a few new plugins and end up with less than 24… simple!

The plugins I kept were:

• Autoptimize
• GDPR Cookie Consent
• Loginizer
• Magical Posts Display
• MC4WP: Mailchimp
• Woody Code Snippets

There were 18 others that I deleted, crossing my fingers it wouldn’t break anything on my site.

And here are the plugins that I then added:

• AMP
• Getwid
• PublishPress Blocks
• Rank Math SEO
• Really Simple SSL
• Sassy Social Share
• Wordfence Security
• WP Fastest Cache
• WP YouTube Lyte

For a grand total of 15 plugins. Far better than 24 and a good number of them having nothing to do with the frontend so wouldn’t add much if any code or CSS bloat on the site.

Why 2 Caching Plugins?

I like to use Autoptimize and WP Fastest Cache because I’ve found each is really good at certain things, so I divide up what each is doing to get the maximum cache savings on my site.

There is a great write-up over on GoodLayers for getting the most out of them, I follow the suggestions they make with the lone exception of the “Inline and Defer CSS?” setting (now titled “Eliminate render-blocking CSS?” in the plugin settings). I don’t check this option only because the CSS of my PureCSS theme is already so small that I don’t find it adds any value for me, however with another theme it might.

Other Plugins I Use and Why

I also use WP YouTube Lyte, it’s a great plugin for speeding up page loads if you embed videos into your posts and pages.

Mobile Performance

AMP is crucial for minimizing your load speeds to mobile users. Just be careful as it doesn’t always play nice with JavaScripts and some JavaScript-reliant plugins out there. In fact, there’s a Gutenburg Blocks plugin that adds lots of nice blocks to the editor which simply won’t work with AMP at all, so I don’t use the advanced blocks as much as I’d love to for this reason. It’s far more vital to have AMP than those blocks available.

WordPress Security

Loginizer and Wordfence Security #FTW – yeah, I say f*&k them bad-bots and script kiddies.

Expanding the Gutenburg Editor

I’ve been a fan of Gutenburg since the beginning and the fact that WP is slowly expanding the core to where soon it will be a full-featured page building CMS without having to use 3rd party plugins like Elementor or Brizy has me stoked.

I’ve never liked those page-building plugins for one simple reason, they’re full of bloat and burden page load speeds.

On the backend though, I want options when creating a post or page, so plugins that give me more blocks in the editor or expand the feature range of existing block types are a must.

You can see from my list the ones I use regularly and installed for this blog.

The blocks plugins that play nice with AMP and I used are:

• Getwid
• Magical Posts Display
• PublishPress Blocks

WordPress SEO

I don’t put a lot of time into SEO anymore, in 2005 it was worth the time investments, today though creating good quality, helpful content is a much better way to focus your resources.

Get the basics of on-page SEO right with a “set it and forget it” plugin like Rank Math and then put your time into creating great content. We’ve actually done a lot of testing on this over recent years and spent a lot of money to do it, and there’s just no comparison between the small bumps working on SEO can bring in traffic to your site compared to the huge gains investing instead into great content will have.

Finally, A Few Miscellaneous Plugins

GDPR Cookie Consent – Every bit a “must have” as SSL certificates are these days.

MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress – If you want to put a signup form to your Mailchimp list on your site there’s no better way in my opinion.

Really Simple SSL – Because, as the name implies, it’s really simple to use.

Sassy Social Share – You have to have social network badges on a blog, don’t you? It’s kind of the law now I think. Out of all the different social sharing plugins out there that I’ve tried this one is the least intrusive and bloat-making.

Woody code snippets – Because I like to tinker. This plugin allows me to create PHP applications right inside of pages on my blog here, like my Leap Domain Name Generator, so it’s a good one for me.

The WordPress Speed Optimization Results

Now that I’ve changed my theme and after all the plugins work I had to do, about a three-hour job in all, what are the results on my page speeds:

Not too bad huh? My mobile page speed increased from 25 all the way up to 97, and the desktop speed went up from 84 to 97 as well.

I could probably squeeze another 1-2% out it if I went back and converted all the images I’ve used on the site to the WebP format thanks to WordPress 5.8 now fully supporting it.

As of today, August 2, 2021, just over 95% of all web users online are running browsers that support WebP images, with the majority of the less than 5% who aren’t being on old versions of IE which WordPress itself isn’t even going to support going forward, so there’s no reason not to use WebP anymore.

But, going back and converting images from old posts is a chore, even with the plugins out there that will help you, and given the speed scores I got without doing that I decided to leave the past behind me, I will be using WebP going forward.

Was this posting helpful to you? Did I give you ideas for improving our own page speeds? If so, please tell me below, I’d love to hear about your thoughts and adventures in WP speed optimizations.

Let me share a real-world example from a client I’ve worked with fairly recently (names changed to protect the innocent of course), and even though this example involves a small Mom-and-Pop pizza shop it’s still perfect in that it illustrates what I consider to be the two most crucial points to a solid domain name strategy.

A client wanted to expand their online ordering when they came to me. They had a great website for their pizza shop, it was well put together, their name branding was good and their online menu and ordering system easy to use. Yet, for over a year their online sales had been a flatline. They received online orders daily but the monthly numbers stayed stagnant month after month despite their best efforts to expand their reach.

The owner told me he wanted to see at least a 10% increase in online orders and was hoping for closer to 20% to be possible. We spoke for about a half-hour and I realized pretty quickly there was an affordable and fast solution for him. I asked, what neighborhoods do you deliver to? The owner replied with five surrounding neighborhoods, plus the one the shop was actually located in.

I said great, do you own the domain names for those neighborhoods? He didn’t understand what I meant, so I explained: “Do you own Neighborhood1Pizza.com, Neighborhood2Pizza.com, Neighborhood3Pizza.com” and so on.

He didn’t, and thirty seconds to check showed all five of the domains for the communities around his shop where he delivered to with the word Pizza added to the neighborhood name were available.

I explained he didn’t necessarily need the domain for the neighborhood his shop was in since everyone there knew his shop by name or passed it often, though I said that it wouldn’t hurt to buy it as well. But for the surrounding communities where his shop wasn’t as highly known and people didn’t tend to drive past it on a daily basis, he absolutely wanted to own those NeighborhoodPizza.com domains.

I said “you’ve got to buy all of these, now”.

He balked at that, not the cost, we were talking under $75 in registration fees, though to be honest if someone owned those names already I’d have pushed him to reach out and negotiate purchases at much higher prices if necessary.

His opposition wasn’t money, but rather effort. He’d spent thousands of dollars and more importantly lots of hours with someone to set up his shop’s website and didn’t want to invest all of that in setting up websites for each of those names.

Fair enough, but I had no intentions on telling him to do that so explained that what he needed was a one-page lander on each domain that branded to his shop, it would be almost a duplicate of his existing homepage but with some minor tweaking to connect them to the individual neighborhoods, and that all of the links from the lander pages would click-through to his primary business site. The work and investment involved was minimal.

We talked a little more on how the existing homepage of his shop site could be tweaked for each individual neighborhood, and as we did he registered all of the domain names I’d told him to, including the one for the community his shop was in. After that, I spent a couple days gathering pictures from the neighborhoods involved and setting up the lander pages on each for him.

Once those were setup we created paper fliers for each neighborhood based on the lander pages design that he added a coupon onto then had a ton printed up. I told him to hire some kids to go to the busy retail spots in each neighborhood on a Saturday and hand out those fliers, just ask people “Do you like pizza? Here’s a great local place with a coupon included.” Instead, he used his nieces and nephews, but they got the job done.

The Results

In the fifth week after the new landing pages went live and the fliers were handed out his online ordering was double what it had been his best week ever since going online.

In the eighth week it was 50% over that fifth week’s ordering.

After that it stabelized. It has continued to grow but at a much slower rate. He’s done the flier handouts a few more times since that I know of and says they still bring a little bump for him each time.

So, when he came to me he was hoping to increase his online ordering by 20%. That was what he saw as the “hopeful” goal.

With minimal investment and effort, we tripled his online sales over his best week ever. That’s the reality of a good domain name strategy that’s used as a complement to a traditional marketing campaign (like printed fliers with coupons).

These are the 2 crucial points I mentioned above.

First, you can’t view domain names or the Internet as the Field of Dreams. If you build it, they won’t come. That’s not how it works. Domain names and websites complement and enhance traditional marketing and sales efforts, they don’t replace them.

And second, a good domain name strategy has to connect with your customers in a meaningful way, not generically. By this I mean the pizza shop owner could have spent millions to buy a generic “killer” name such as Pizza.com for example, and he’d have lost everything most likely. Don’t get me wrong, Pizza.com is a great name, but unless you’re operating a national chain of pizza shops it’s useless to you. The people who live in the neighborhoods he delivers to may not all know his shop name, or it may not be top on their minds, but when they want pizza they’re going to want it from a shop that’s close and delivers to their door, so NeighborhoodPizza.com is sticky. Between the fliers being handed out and word of mouth from there, it connects with the shop’s full potential customer base.

This example may be of a small Mom-and-Pop pizza shop, but the strategy employed and illustrated is every bit as valid for any industry or personality of any size. If you remember that domain names and websites enhance and complement traditional marketing, not replace it, and you ensure that the domains you purchase and sites you build connect with your customers in a meaningful way for them, then you’ve got a winning domain name strategy.

Edited to add:

After posting this I had a few questions come to mind myself on the example I provided, so I reached out to my friend, the pizza shop owner, and asked him. Here I’ll share the information for clarity sake.

Q. Did the rise in online ordering coincide with a decline in phone orders? This seems important as it indicates whether there was actually an expansion in reach for his shop or just a transition in the medium used by his existing customer base.

He told me there was a low single-digit percentage drop in phone orders overall. He didn’t give an exact figure but said it was “close to about 5%”. I followed up asking since obviously the number of phone orders each week was different from online orders, how did it compare? Without actual numbers on-hand he put it at “roughly 20 or so new online orders to each phone order lost”.

In other words, the work we did for him didn’t just result in moving customers from phone orders to online ordering, though some may have switched the overall gains were truly growth of his customer base.

He expanded that to say they were still doing their normal print advertising, weekly menu mailers to their delivery area, ads within community papers, that kind of thing. And despite always including their main shop website with these, in general, most of this print reach has always resulted in phone orders.

Whatever customers may have transitioned from phone orders to online he’s perfectly happy with. As he explained a phone order ties up either himself or one of his employees for 3 to 5 minutes. An online order prints out right at the counter and is being prepared in seconds.

Q. My other question was regarding online customer acquisition. Had he done anything online to try and promote these new domains we purchased for the campaign or his main shop website since we set this all up?

The answer was no.

Those were my own two follow-up questions and I’m happy I was able to reach out to him, and that he was willing to answer them for me for this little blog posting.

That said, to add my own two-cents on the second question, I’m a firm believer in the 80/20 rule, and just having the NeighborhoodPizza.com domains and literally putting them into potential customer’s hands with the print fliers is the 80 here. Paying someone (or trying to do it yourself) to work on SEO and online marketing for this would likely have minimal impact, at best, and could quickly become far more costly than the initial campaign itself was to create and employ.

That isn’t going to be true in all cases, everything is unique, and again it comes down to connecting with your customers in a meaningful way as I said much earlier here. Part of that is knowing where your customers are. If you can reach 80% of them with a cost-effective flier handout then hiring an SEO or Marketing agency to get some fraction of that other 20% may not be the best use of your resources.

Enter The Age Of Brandable Domains

Now that “Lunarly.com” is basically on par with “ApolloMoonLandings.com” when it comes to ranking with search engines, it makes more sense (and can be a lot more fun) to brand your website with a memorable domain rather than using keywords in some clunky fashion.

This doesn’t mean that keyword domains don’t still have a valuable place on the Internet, they do. It just isn’t in getting better search rankings overall. I (and my company) purchase keyword domains all the time for projects, but we’re very specific in what and why we buy. Generally, it’s only a product name/description keyword domain.

An example of this is CompressionKneeBrace.com. A good-and-clunky keyword domain for sure, and it doesn’t rank well with search engines, but that isn’t why we bought and use this keyword domain. Our goal was specifically to have an un-branded retail site where people knew exactly what was being offered. And on a bonus side note, since the term “compression knee brace” gets a fair amount of monthly search volume that meant there would be a small percentage of people who simply type the keyword term and add “.com” to it in their browsers.

It’s a funny thing but people do this. They take a chance not knowing if a website even exists when they’re seeking something so specific, and that’s free traffic that a keyword domain can still grab for you.

Still, unless I’m developing a project around a specific product like the example above, I stay clear of keyword domains like that.

But There’s A Catch

Some brandable domains can still be keyword based. Yes, everything is complex with technology isn’t it.

In my opinion, there are two types of brandable domains. The first is a totally invented or manipulated word domain. Examples of this are Google, Fiverr, and Canva. In the cases of Fiverr and Canva the domain still indicates the “offering” of the sites, but in the case of Google if you think back to before it became a household word nobody knew what a google was. An example from my own portfolio of such a domain that’s as of yet undeveloped is Precu.com. I loved the way it sounded when I found it available (I describe below exactly how I found this domain) and only learned after purchasing it that precu is Latvian and means “the product” or “the goods”, which to me is an added bonus.

The second type of brandable domain is what I call the “brandable term” domain. Here’s where you get to mix high-value keywords with other words for a name that’s descriptive, uses keywords, and can be branded easily into something memorable.

An as-of-yet undeveloped example of this second type of brandable domain name from my own portfolio is ToolTough.com. I purchased this domain for a project based on a product line of toolboxes, tool storage items, and heavy canvas tool carrying totes that I’ll eventually have time to get launched.

Coming up with these types of domains can be easy or hard if you try brainstorming them. That’s how I used to do it and sometimes I’d get 50 ideas in an hour, while other times I’d sit at my desk for half the day and get nothing. Eventually I grew tired of wasting so much time and built a tool that just did it for me using the most popular and common domain word additions, so I could just plug in my keyword (in this example “tool”) and let it find me what was available, then pick the best one based on how it sounded to my own ear. There’s a lot of personal taste involved when it comes to brandables. Anyway, the tool I created is the Leap Domain Name Generator and is available right here on this site so feel free to use it.

Finding Those One-Word-ish Brandables

I said above that I’d outline how I found the domain Precu.com and it’s really an easy way of finding short and memorable domains that can be branded to whatever project you’re working on.

In my case, this is often applications or premium WordPress themes I want to put a sales and promotion site together for. I find walk-throughs to be the easiest to learn from myself so what I’ll do here is walk through the actual process with you as if I had a newly developed premium WordPress theme I was about to launch. Basically, at this stage I’d be seeking a domain that sounded right to my ear as both the domain but also the theme name, so let’s get started.

Step #1

Visit ExpiredDomains.net and if you don’t already have a free account signup for one and login.

Step #2

Once logged in, open the drop-down under “Deleted .com” and you want to select the full list (the very first option, in the image below it’s titled “Deleted .com Domains (2,099,370)”).

Step #3

We don’t want to sift through over 2 million domain names here, and most of them aren’t the type of domains we’re seeking anyway so let’s filter them out by clicking on the “Show Filter” link just above where the domain listings begin (link visible in bottom left of the image below).

Step #4

In the filtering options that open up look for the block titled “Domain Name Settings” and then check the items labeled “no Numbers” and “no Hyphens”. Both numbers and hyphens are confusing to end-users which is the opposite of what a good brandable domain name should be.

Next, find the box titled “Listing Settings” and check the item labeled “Only available Domains”, then click the blue “Apply Filters” button.

Step #5

Now that we’ve removed anything with numbers or hyphens or that’s already been registered after they expired, click on the list header labeled “LE” to sort all of the remaining domain names by length, from shortest (probably will be 5 letters) to longest.

Step #6 (The Weeds)

Now comes the fun part, start going through the pages and looking for domains that are pronounceable and you feel suited to your project(s).

Since I said I’d do this as though I were looking for a domain name for a premium WordPress theme product, just looking through the listing I found the following on the first 5 pages (and there are thousands of pages full of 5, then 6, then 7 letter domains to keep looking if I needed):

• kyazz.com
• lubaj.com
• tweid.com
• uveos.com
• vaihu.com
• wpsev.com
• hajuu.com
• squsi.com
• etsak.com
• uknol.com
• omawg.com

Every one of these could make a great name and domain for a WP theme site, if I were working on a different kind of project my thoughts on what is good or not as I scanned the list might be different so I might have come up with a different list of finds, the point is there are tons of brandable domains out there just waiting to be snatched up.

Looking over just this short list from the first few pages, for my imaginary WP theme site I’d likely go with “WPSev.com” (because of the WP for WordPress then using the “Sev” as the theme name), or else I’d pick either Tweid.com or Uveos.com since both have that WP theme sound to them to my ear. Still, every one of these is a good candidate.

NOTE: At the time of this writing all of these domains are available, I didn’t register any of them as this was just an example, so if you like one of them they’re up for grabbing until they’re gone.

Step #7

Once I’ve decided on a domain name for my project I’ll head over to BanProNET to register it and grab hosting (using the 12 Month Billing Cycle the domain registration is free and hosting is only $3.99 per month).

Completing the order process my account would be instantly set up and available to me, so I’d just login and could begin setting up the site for my new project.

There You Have It

There are certainly other ways to find brandable domain names but this is tried and true, and most importantly for me it’s fast and easy. I’ve always got more projects than time to work on them, illustrated by the fact I’ve got so many undeveloped domains in my portfolio currently. I’ve also got plenty of important things keeping my mind occupied around the clock, as most business owners and web developers do. So, “fast and easy” is just what I want when it comes to tasks like picking a project name.

If you found this posting helpful or have ideas for other quick ways to find brandable domain names please leave a comment below and share it.

First I think we need to define web development. It can mean different things. There’s front end development which covers design and display of a website or app on the client side. Essentially everything users will see and interact with.

Then there’s back end development which encompasses all of the “behind the curtains” work being done server-side with data before it’s displayed to users or while they’re interacting with your front end.

And there’s also full- stack development which is both front end and back end development combined.

I’m going to cover the full range here, so regardless of what you’re planning to focus on these are the languages that I suggest mastering.

The Language List:

• HTML
• CSS
• JavaScript
• PHP

I’ll go into each language below as well as explain why I specifically recommend each one.

HTML

HTML is a front end language and is the web. Anything and everything you see on a website or app begins with some HTML at its core.

The good thing with HTML is that it’s a very simple and direct “markup” language. There’s very little logical operating involved with learning it so it’s easy to grasp and become proficient with.

The bad thing with HTML is that because it’s so thin in terms of operational logic it’s very forgiving of sloppy usage and it becomes easy for coders to form bad habits with, resulting in code that “works” in general, but is so ill-formed it creates problems for some end users. This is especially true for those on assisted devices.

The takeaway with HTML: Don’t be sloppy. Learn about semantic markup and use it to ensure you’re providing all of your visitors with the best experience that you can. Also learn about ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) best practices for accessibility.

Bonus Tip: Once you’ve fully grasped HTML then look to speedup your coding with it by learning and using PUG. PUG isn’t so much a language (some will argue this) as it is a shorthand template that compiles (converts) into HTML via the software you’re developing with.

PUG

Basically, PUG lets you write code that looks more like human readable paragraphs than code and greatly reduces the actual amount of code you have to write since you won’t be including all of the tags and closing tags of HTML.

Let’s look at a quick example, first some HTML:

<!DOCTYPE html>  
<html lang="en">  
  <head>
    <link rel='stylesheet' href='css/style.css' type='text/css' media='all'>
    <title>Pug vs. HTML</title>
  </head>
  <body>
    <main>
      <article class="blogPosting">
        <header class="blogHeader">
          <h1 class="blogTitle">Your Article Title</h1>
        </header>
        <section class="thePost">
          <p>A first paragraph of your article.</p>
          <p>The second paragraph paragraph of your article.</p>
          <p>And so on...</p>
        </section>
      </article>
    </main>
 </body>
</html>

The HTML example above is 21 lines of code using 576 typed characters. Now lets look at the same code in PUG:

doctype html
html(lang='en')
  head
    link(rel='stylesheet', href='css/style.css', type='text/css', media='all')
    title Pug vs. HTML
  body
    main
      article.blogPosting
        header.blogHeader
          h1.blogTitle Your Article Title
        section.thePost
          p A first paragraph of your article.
          p The second paragraph paragraph of your article.
          p And so on...

The PUG markup which will compile into the exact same HTML as the example above it uses just 14 lines of code and 403 typed characters.

As you can see, PUG isn’t just more easily readable, but also greatly reduces and speeds up the developer’s work; and that’s only scratching the surface. Add in that PUG allows you to use conditionals, includes, mixins, and so much more then you begin to realize the real power of PUG as a tool. It’s well worth adding PUG into your workflow once you’ve learned the fundamentals of HTML.

CSS

Much like HTML, CSS is the backbone of website and app display. While HTML encompasses the display of data, CSS encompasses the presentation of how that data is displayed. It allows us to manipulate the appearance of HTML elements and data.

Also like HTML, CSS isn’t an operational logic language so is fairly easy to learn. However, CSS has a lot more functionality and nuanced detail to it than HTML, it’s also a bit hinky since not all browsers handle various elements of CSS exactly the same (and you’ll probably spend tons of time checking with Can I Use to make sure your designs won’t break on older but still used web browsers), so it will likely take a little longer to become proficient with.

The takeaway with CSS: don’t skimp or rush through the learning process with CSS. It’s a powerful tool with lots of little gems that are often overlooked or left in the “I can look that up if I need it” pile by developers and designers, and these are the details that mean the difference between designers who produce $50 templates and designers who can command four or even five-figures for each project. Even if you’re only learning for your own personal site(s), go for quality.

Bonus Tip: Like with PUG for HTML, CSS has its own shorthand templates that will convert into CSS by your development software as well. The two most common being LESS and SASS. Personally I prefer SASS.

SASS

When it comes to SASS, there’s two syntax versions of it, .scss which is nearly identical to CSS and gives you all the benefits of SASS without having to learn a different way of writing your styles from CSS, in fact you can rename a .css file to .scss and it’s valid; then there is .sass which is written more like PUG for HTML is, using indentation rather than semi-colons and curly braces.

While .scss has become more popular in recent times, I again prefer .sass because I want to type less to do more and I find the indented syntax of .sass more friendly or human readable.

Regardless of which syntax you might prefer, SASS (or LESS) provide extended tools–things like variables, mixins, operators, etc.–that will enhance and speedup your style coding. 

Here’s a quick comparison of the same code in CSS, then SCSS, and finally in SASS syntax:

/* -- CSS SYNTAX -- */
.message, .success, .error, .warning {
  border: 1px solid #cccccc;
  padding: 10px;
  color: #333;
}

.success {
  border-color: green;
  -webkit-border-radius: 5px;
  border-radius: 5px;
  background-clip: padding-box;
  /* stops bg color from leaking outside the border: */
}

.error {
  border-color: red;
  -webkit-border-radius: 15px;
  border-radius: 15px;
  background-clip: padding-box;
  /* stops bg color from leaking outside the border: */
  -webkit-transform: rotate(10deg);
  -ms-transform: rotate(10deg);
  transform: rotate(10deg);
}

.warning {
  border-color: yellow;
  -webkit-border-radius: 10px;
  border-radius: 10px;
  background-clip: padding-box;
  /* stops bg color from leaking outside the border: */
  -webkit-transform: rotate(5deg);
  -ms-transform: rotate(5deg);
  transform: rotate(5deg);
}

.box {
  -webkit-transform: rotate(30deg);
  -ms-transform: rotate(30deg);
  transform: rotate(30deg);
}

/* -- SCSS SYNTAX -- */
@mixin transform($property) {
  -webkit-transform: $property;
      -ms-transform: $property;
          transform: $property;
}

@mixin border-radius($radius) {
  -webkit-border-radius: $radius;
  border-radius: $radius;
  background-clip: padding-box;  /* stops bg color from leaking outside the border: */
}

.message, .success, .error, .warning {
  border: 1px solid #cccccc;
  padding: 10px;
  color: #333;
}

.success {
  border-color: green;
  @include border-radius(5px);
}

.error {
  border-color: red;
  @include border-radius(15px);
  @include transform(rotate(10deg));
}

.warning {
  border-color: yellow;
  @include border-radius(10px);
  @include transform(rotate(5deg));
}

.box {
  @include transform(rotate(30deg));
}

/* -- SASS Syntax -- */
=transform($property)
  -webkit-transform: $property
  -ms-transform:     $property
  transform:         $property

=border-radius($radius)
  -webkit-border-radius: $radius
  border-radius: $radius
  background-clip: padding-box;  /* stops bg color from leaking outside the border: */

.message,
.success,
.error,
.warning
  border: 1px solid #cccccc
  padding: 10px
  color: #333

.success
  border-color: green
  +include border-radius(5px)

.error
  border-color: red
  +include border-radius(15px)
  +include transform(rotate(10deg))

.warning
  border-color: yellow
  +include border-radius(10px)
  +include transform(rotate(5deg))

.box
  +include transform(rotate(30deg))

As the examples above show, the same code becomes a lot easier to read in the .sass syntax, at least for my eyes, it’s just cleaner and void of unnecessary semi-colons and curly braces.

Again, either syntax of SASS is a powerful tool to add to your development setup, and allows your style coding to become more streamlined and modular, adding in “write once and use everywhere” capabilities with mixins and other functions. It’s well worth adding a CSS template language into your workflow, after you’ve learned CSS itself.

JavaScript

JavaScript is primarily a front end development language that allows for turning the data of your static HTML and CSS into a more complex and dynamic experience for users. 

That said, there are times when JavaScript becomes a back-end language as well with the help of a framework and runtime engine like NodeJS, but as you may have noticed by now I’m not a big fan of frameworks. In most cases they’re unnecessary layers of abstraction that encourage lazy, sloppy, and often insecure development.

However, one caveat here, I use NodeJS in my development setup for running dev tools like Gulp which allow me to work with PUG and SASS and I do appreciate what NodeJS offers on that end, but I never use it–or condone its use–outside of that role in the development sphere. If you want to do server-side processing on a live site, use a language better suited to it than “JavaScript on top of a runtime engine”.

I also suggest avoiding libraries and frameworks like jQuery and Vue and so on until long after you’ve learned all the ins-and-outs of vanilla javascript.

A quick aside here to support my last statement:

I was interviewing developers not too long ago for a large project my company had acquired and as part of the process of assessing their proficiency I asked each how they would approach ensuring the DOM (document object model) was loaded in their javascript when they had to provide browser compatibility back to IE 8.

Since you may not know much about javascript yet I’ll explain here that making sure the DOM is loaded prior to executing your script is vital since you can’t perform functions and manipulate what hasn’t finished loading.

I used this specific question to ensure each candidate could actually write javascript and wasn’t just going to rely on other people’s work with libraries like jQuery to do the heavy lifting. I’ve met too many like this over the years and would never hire somebody that didn’t fully grasp the work and tools of the job.

To be fair here, I only interviewed five candidates for this specific project before finding one that was outstanding, but of those five there was one who couldn’t offer a working method without the use of jQuery’s “$(document).ready()” function.

This isn’t a large pool, but still it was 1 in 5, or 20% who failed a basic understanding of the primary tool (language) used in the position they were applying for. Imagine a carpenter who’s able to use an air-powered nail gun but can’t tell you what a hammer is, would you hire them to build your house?

The takeaway with javascript: It’s a fairly basic client-side language to learn with powerful capabilities that can manipulate and transform the data, HTML, and CSS of a static billboard-like website into a trip to Disney World for your end users. It’s also a good introduction to operational logic and object oriented programming (OOP) that probably won’t leave you too frustrated or pulling your hair out trying to grasp.

Bonus Tip: There are tons of libraries and frameworks out there which can make your use of javascript more fun and speedup the time you spend developing your scripts and applications. While I always advocate against trying to pretzel-twist javascript into a server-side language in any way, I fully encourage the exploration and use of these libraries and frameworks to enhance your work after you’ve become proficient with the core language.

PHP

The ‘old clunker’ of the web. It isn’t modern. It isn’t sexy. It rarely gets positive coverage in the press, but PHP keeps chugging along and doing it’s job as a server-side language.

While other languages rise and fall in popularity and use online, PHP stays steady as the most used and most wide-spread language. It powers over three-quarters of the web (w3techs.com puts this at 78.9% in their known server-side languages usage chart). It’s also the processing engine beneath WordPress, which is the content management choice for 32% of websites online at the time of this writing. 

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not a PHP fanboy. I’m just pragmatic and goal oriented, and when I’ve got a web dev project in front of me I want to use the stable tool that’s going to let me get it done and be easy to maintain and update as time goes on. That’s what PHP brings to the table as a language.

This isn’t to say PHP is “the right tool” for all jobs or projects, nothing is. But, if you’re looking for a server-side language to invest your time into learning as a foundation for your skill set that is near-future-proof it’s PHP.

The takeaways for PHP: It’s a loose and flexible language which makes it easy to learn, but be careful not to let your code become too loose or it can quickly become unmanageable even with small projects. If you’ve learned javascript already then you’ll find the syntax and logic of PHP very familiar, plus you’ll be able to leap right in with PHP’s powerful OOP capabilities.

Bonus Tip: Like with javascript there are tons of libraries and frameworks out there for speeding up and enhancing PHP development, as well as tools like composer for making your workflow easier. Just take the time to learn the fundamentals first before diving into them otherwise you can fall into the lazy and sloppy coder trap very easy with this language.

Final Thoughts

Having given my language suggestions and explained the why behind each, let me close this with a few thoughts on web development.

In my opinion, on the front end it’s all about providing users with the best experience possible. Don’t get hung up with things like trying to make the site look the same on all devices.  That’s putting the platform ahead of the content and the user.

Instead, think in terms of mobile first with progressive enhancement. Focus on delivering your content in the best way possible for your users based on their devices.

Whether it’s appearance or functionality, always think bottom-up. Start with delivering your content optimized for the smallest and least powerful device your user may have, then add on bells and whistles based on device sizes and capabilities.

You’ll never account for every device or browser out there, and if you did something new would come along tomorrow to break it anyway.

And on the back end, it’s always about the need for speed. I don’t just mean the speed of an individual user visiting your site and your program delivering up something for them, I mean you have to design your programs to account for a high volume of users hitting your site all at once.

Make sure your code is logical, organized, optimized. It’s not just about bandwidth but also the processing power of your server and maybe your database if your site depends on one.

Constantly ask yourself if you’re doing things in the best possible way. Don’t cut corners just to get it done. Use caching. Think about security. 

Happy coding!

Whether you’re launching (or trying to grow) a personal blog or a business related website, you have to have a plan for creating quality content that will attract visitors to your pages.

What follows is the (very long and in-depth) approach I’ve used and helped client’s to adopt for years, obviously because it works.

1. Find Your PCK’s (Perfect Content Keywords)

If you’ve spent any time trying to start a blog or online business already then no doubt you’ve read tons of advice on finding keywords, from complicated formulas to even the odd-ball person saying “don’t worry about keywords”.

Much of what you’ll find out there, depending on the source, is quality information but often times it’s targeted at the wrong audience.

What do I mean by that? Basically, the individual just starting out is not going to have the resources to rank for very much with Google. It’s purely a numbers game and there’s always people more experienced than you, not to mention larger companies and organizations with deeper pockets; and the majority of information on SEO and keywords is targeted to them.

So what can the “little guy” do? Simple, you go after the overlooked dust. Let everyone else chase the big nuggets of gold for now, narrow your focus in on the dust that’s trickling down stream because that dust adds up, and it can add up very quickly.

Everybody wants to target the keywords that get 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 monthly searches or more. That’s where all the traffic is, right?

Wrong! That’s where the bulk of traffic, often generic and untargeted, resides.

It’s in the smaller terms, what are called long tail keywords, that you’ll find the gold dust that’s easy to collect and be able to truly target your traffic by intent.

That last statement is key to understand here. You don’t just want traffic, you want traffic that wants or needs what you’re offering, that’s the user intent, to find the answer or solution that you’re able to give them.

If you want a little proof on the power of long tails let me share two brands with you who’s stories of mastering the long tails of search and building empires upon it are well documented online: Amazon & eBay.

Both companies spent tons on search marketing and they didn’t spend it advertising on keywords like “Horror Books”, no they spent their resources on long tail terms like “Stephen King’s Pet Sematary paperback”.

Why? Because the person searching for “Horror Books” may not even be a buyer, they may be looking for information for a school paper, or even if they are looking for books to buy they’re still very “cold” in terms of intent, in the retail world they’re window shoppers who may or may not make a purchase.

But, the person who searches for “Stephen King’s Pet Sematary paperback” is almost certainly on a mission to find and buy a copy of that book, so if you sell that book it’s an easy conversion for you to make if you can just get in front of that buyer’s eyeballs, and that’s how Amazon and eBay both built themselves up into online retail juggernauts.

They did it with paid search marketing, but it works for organic search traffic just the same. The traffic is out there, and the terms are easy to rank for when you know how to pick them.

When you drill down to the long tail terms, you’re able to see exactly what searchers are looking for, then provide it to them in a harmonious way that means more profits/subscribers/followers for your efforts.

Here is my method for finding PCK’s (Perfect Content Keywords) that you can use to build articles or blog postings around and rank easily and fast in the search results with:

• Use the Google Chrome browser and install the free Keywords Everywhere browser extension from https://keywordseverywhere.com
• Start searching Google for terms, even short ones, related to your business, industry, niche, topics.
• You’ll see the Keywords Everywhere extension adds a column of keyword suggestions on the right of your screen that includes average monthly search volumes. Begin keeping a list of all the terms that have under 200 monthly searches AND display user intent that matches your needs (i.e. if you want to sell widgets ignore terms like “free widgets” or “how to get widgets for free”, these aren’t good intent terms for you when you’re trying to sell, these users want it free), even the terms that have ZERO (I’ll explain this below) monthly searches are great, and keep repeating this until you’ve got a nice long list of possible terms that fit the “under 200 monthly searches and good intent” factors.
• Now go through your list, and one by one search each term in Google with the “allintitle:” operator. That looks like this allintitle:KEYWORD TERM

• When you use the allintitle operator, Google will display a number above the first result that looks like this: “About ### results”, where ### will be some actual number. If that number is below 100 then put this term onto a new list, it’s a great longtail keyword by the numbers.
• Do this for your entire list of terms you created in the earlier step above, and when done you should have a shorter list, but it’s a list of great terms both by the numbers and by intent for you to use.
• Now take your shorter list, and using a new Icognito Tab (Ctrl + Shift + N) on your browser search each term (this time without the allintitle operator) again, and look at the first page of results. Google has been working hard lately to keep people on their own service, they do this by offering what’s called Zero Spot solution results, usually bullet lists that answer the search term question, and playable videos right in the search results. This means you’re not only competing with the top ten organic search results plus paid ads, but also with Google themselves for user’s eyeballs and clicks. If there’s a lot of this “provided by Google” type content on the first page of results then your term is less useful. Fortunately, by targeting long tails you shouldn’t run into this with a lot of the terms you’ve collected so far. So go through your short list and separate out the terms that don’t have much (or any) of Google’s solution content displaying, these are your PCK’s.
• You’ve done a lot of work to this point, but trust me it’s worth it, you should now have a very short list of great keyword terms that don’t have tough Google competition for you.

Okay, you’ve completed the first of 3 steps in this guide now, but let me quickly explain why I said even the ZERO monthly search terms are good stuff.

As I mentioned earlier, everyone chases the big traffic terms, this means they overlook (and lots even filter out) these low search volume terms all together when picking their keywords to target.

But here’s the secret sauce, when you create quality content (as I’m about to show you how to do in step 2 below) around one of these search terms, you’re not just going to have an easy time ranking for this term, but your content is going to be full of dozens of other long tail terms you’re not knowingly targeting, terms you’re not even going to realize you’ve got, and all of those are going to bring you traffic too.

I’m serious in this, it’s not unusual at all to target a term that says it gets ZERO monthly searches on average and have that single article or blog posting turn into a few hundred new visitors to your website every month for you.

Think about this. A single piece of content that you can create in a few hours, which I’m going to show you how to do in step 2 below, that can bring you a couple hundred highly targeted readers or leads month after month for as long as you’re online.

That’s thousands of targeted visitors/leads coming to you every year. Is that worth the little effort of the system this guide is showing you? I can tell you from experience and watching businesses grow over and over again using it that yes, it is!

This isn’t generic traffic, it’s not cold traffic, these are motivated and targeted visitors coming to you looking for what you’re about to offer them, already believing you’ve got what they need or want.

Forget the hype out there about articles, blog posts, videos, social media gone viral, and anything else that brings in thousands of visitors overnight. Anyone can write a click-bait article and generate tons of useless traffic that never converts for them or becomes regular readers. What I’ve just given you is the key to bringing in actual customers and followers on a consistent basis.

And it’s like a faucet, if you want more quality traffic then you repeat the process and create more content pieces until you reach the flow you desire.

Now, let me show you how to create the kind of content pieces that are vital to putting these PCK’s to work for you in the next step.

2. Your Content Factory

This is the step where most website owners I’ve worked with over the years groan and grumble, but without this all your efforts are for naught. The good news however, and what usually turns frowns around with my clients, is when I tell them “Do this right and you can all but eliminate the time and money you’ve been spending in the past on link building for your site.”

It’s absolutely true. There was a time when backlinks were the gold of the web, there was an entire link-economy built up around them because everybody knew if you wanted to rank in the search results you needed tons of backlinks.

Fortunately, 2005 is long gone now and the search engines have become better at their actual purpose, which is placing the best quality content in front of searchers.

Using this template below I’m going to show you how to create incredible content around your topic (keyword term) and with the added fact that the term you’re targeting has such low competition (as we discovered going through the steps of part 1 above) you’re going to have a great chance of not only getting on the first page of results right away, but even into the top 3 or 5 of the results without having to do any sort of backlinking at all.

The first step in a great piece of content is creating your title. You need to use your keyword term here, optimally without breaking it up at all, but sometimes you’ll need to in order to use proper grammar and for human readability, that’s okay if you must.

As an example, let’s say the term you’re targeting is “get rid of stink bugs attic”. Now, there’s no way to use that term exactly as-is and have it be grammatically correct or not appear “SEO optimised” in a way that screams to searchers “spammy sales crap”. People aren’t dumb and they can spot someone trying to game them in the search results.

Instead, you’re going to have to change that into something like “get rid of stink bugs in your attic” or “from your attic”, and that’s okay to do. You want to avoid separating the keyword term words where possible, but don’t be afraid to do it when needed.

Now go a step further, because you’re not just creating a simple article or blog posting on getting rid of stink bugs from the attic, you’re going to be creating “the” piece of content on this topic, so preface the title with something like “Ultimate Guide To” or “Ten Ways To” or “All You Need To” and etc., in other words make a statement that this is the complete and best answer to the searcher’s problem.

Finally, consider adding the year to the end of the title, in parenthesis, and every December set a few days aside to go through your published content, update it, and change the titles for the next year.

Final result for a title: “Ultimate Guide For How To Get Rid Of Stink Bugs From Your Attic (in 2018)”.

Now that you’ve got a title that’s going to grab eyeballs and attention it’s onto the hard part, creating your piece of content:

Your content needs to be above 1,500 words in length. Even longer is better, but 1,500 words should be your minimum baseline.

Believe it or not, writing that much isn’t really hard or that time consuming, and bonus tip if you use dictation (Google Docs with voice is a great free option for this) you can get it done in under an hour once you’re used to dictating.

I never write a piece of content below 2,000 words myself, and with dictation I can usually knock it out in under an hour with a coffee break in the middle. The average person speaks at a rate of 4,000 words per hour, so a 2,000 word piece of content with a coffee break in the middle is totally feasible.

I work in sprints, so normally my content creation process looks like this:

• 20 to 25 minutes writing (dictating)
• A 10 to 15 minute coffee break
• Another 20 to 25 minutes writing (dictating) and done

You’ll find what works best for yourself, typing or dictating, working in sprints or straight through. The most important thing to getting from nothing to finished with articles and blog posts is to begin with an outline.

A simple bullet point list, I try to make ten bullet points for a 2,000 word piece of content, so how many bullets you need or want will depend, but what I’ve found works is to bullet point whatever you’re going to discuss and shoot for about 200 words per bullet when fleshing the outline out into the full article.

This makes things really easy and takes away the daunting nature of thinking you have to write 2,000 words on the topic. No, you only have to write 200 words on a handful of topics instead, which is so much easier.

If you need help coming up with your outline bullet points here’s a few great ways to knock it out in a couple of minutes:

1. Look for a course at Udemy or some other course-based websites on the topic, the outline of the course usually has up to 50 individual topics/lectures listed, use them as your guide and creative inspiration. Don’t copy them word for word, but let them inspire you on however many bullet points you need.
2. Visit Amazon and find books on the topic, use the Look Inside feature and scan the Table of Contents, same as with Udemy above here’s your creative inspiration for making your own outline bullet points.
3. Search YouTube for videos on your topic and watch them, you just want to listen for the key points and takeaways in the video, and again there’s your creative inspiration.
4. Use Wikipedia, go lookup your topic and pay attention to the Table of Contents that appears (on longer entries) or the way the entry is laid out.
5. Combine all of the 4 tricks above and turn your piece of content into a true pillar on your website by producing something upwards of 5,000 words! Remember, the longer the piece of content is (without useless fluff) the more unknown long tail keyword terms you’re going to naturally include in the copy and rank for with Google, meaning the more traffic that single piece of content is going to deliver to you.

Once you’ve got your outline it’s just a matter of going from one bullet to the next, using your own words to describe and answer each one in as much detail as you can. You’ll find this goes super fast and makes the entire article or blog post writing process a breeze.

Once written, get yourself some images (watch for licenses and copyrights) to pepper into your article. Eye candy keeps people on your page and makes your content more interesting.

NOTE: I haven’t discussed methods for converting these visitors or giving them calls to action and so on here. This guide is about getting your content up and ranking fast in Google so traffic conversions is really beyond the scope of it.

Now, let’s go on to the final step of this process, and good news it’s a short and easy one.

3. Tell Google About Your New Piece Of Content

This is the final and easiest step in the whole process and should take you less than five minutes the first time you do it, and about a minute every time after that.

What you want to do is tell Google about your new piece of content and encourage Google’s spider bots to crawl it immediately.

To do this (steps 1 to 3 below only need done the first time if you haven’t already added your domain to Google’s Webmaster Tools / Search Console before):

1. Go to the Google Search Console https://search.google.com/search-console/about
2. Login with your Google account (if you don’t have one make one)
3. Add your website as a property to the dashboard, and verify it (Google will show you several easy options for verifying the website is yours)
4. Make sure you’re using the new version of the Search Console (if you’re not there will be a big blue button in the top right saying Try The New Search Console)
5. At the very top of the dashboard is a place to type a URL that says “Inspect any URL in YOUR-DOMAIN”, here type in the full URL of your new piece of content, not the URL to your home page but the URL to the specific new page with your new article or blog post on it
6. Press Enter and wait until Google checks their index to see if the page is already included, if there’s any errors Google will tell you what they are and how to fix them
7. Since your page is brand new it won’t be included in their index yet, so now click the link that appears titled “Request Indexing” and wait for Google to say it’s crawled your page
8. For good measure now press the gray button at the top right titled “Test Live URL”

That’s it! Google may say it will take some time for the page to be indexed, but my experience is that within about 3 minutes you’ll show up if you search for your full article or blog post title, and I’ve seen pages rank within a few hours for the specific keyword term that was targeted.

This process works and it isn’t gaming anything or manipulating Google in any way, you’re just helping Google do what they want to do in the first place, which is put the best content possible in front of searcher’s eyes. And you’re helping searchers by providing them with a great piece of content that answers their questions or helps them to solve their problems.

If you’ve found this guide useful please share it or leave me a comment saying so below. And if you’ve had any trouble understanding any of it or are unclear on any points also feel free to comment below and I’ll do my best to help you out.

Of course there are a few stages involved with each step, it wouldn’t be a very informative or helpful posting if I didn’t walk you through the full process and offer my personal insights for you, so that’s just what I’m going to do. Read on and lets get started!

1. How To Come Up With A Website Name

What is a domain name? There’s a good answer to this which goes deep into the technical weeds of how the Internet operates, but for 99.9% of people the answer is: the online identity by which people know you, your blog, or your business.

What makes a great domain name?

An excellent question with no easy answer. The truth is it depends what your goal is, and even who you talk to. The best I can do is give you my ideas on it based on experience.

For my money when looking at domain names for projects I look for all of the following criteria:

1. It must be a .com TLD
   i. The .com is and always will be King in the domain world
   ii. Don’t be seduced by cheaper prices on other/genericTLD’s because almost nobody will find you on them
   iii. If the name you really want is taken in the .com but the .net or .org is available, either attempt to purchase the .com from the current owner (and be prepared to pay a fair aftermarket price) or find another name to really want that’s available in the .com, you’ll thank me later
2. It should be short
   i. As in 13 characters or less (excluding the four “.com” characters)
   ii. No more than two words – WeBuyAnyCar.com has done a great job in branding their four word domain, but they’ve spent a lot of time and money to get there
   iii. No hyphens, ever
3. It should be descriptive
   i. At least one of the two words should define you or your purpose – i.e. if you run a small store that sells beds BedStore.com is way better than FredsDeals.com
   ii. Thinking outside the box works here, if BedStore.com is taken (as it likely is) then DeepSleeps.com is a good alternative that fits the 4th criteria next:
4. It should be memorable (brandable)
   i. Sticking with the example from #3 above, BedStore.com is always better than FredsDeals.com because it describes your store that sells beds plainly, however a more memorable (or catchy) domain like DeepSleeps.com might be an even better option, this becomes a judgement call

A lot to consider I know, but spending a little bit of time getting it right before you start will save you tons of headaches down the road.

For some great ideas I created a Domain Name Generator Tool that I use myself when searching for domain names that match the above criteria and are available to register. I have now made it available here on my blog for everyone so give it a whirl.

The same four criteria hold true whether you’re launching your site as a personal blog or putting your business / latest venture online.

I bet if you asked Darren Rowse, one of the most successful and widely known bloggers on the web, he’d tell you that he’s glad he went with ProBlogger.com rather than DarrenSharing.com or RowseHouse.com back in 2004.

A rose by any other domain name, is not still a rose.

Best Place To Register A Domain Name:

In reality all of the well known Domain Registrars provide the same basic service.

If you’re heavy into domain investing and the buying and selling of domains on the after-market then there’s good reason to research them more thoroughly, but if you just need to register a domain for your site then the biggest factor is likely to be pricing and for that reason I recommend NameSilo.

Their pricing, specifically for .com TLD’s (extensions) is unbeatable. As an aside, I do a lot of domain buying and selling and I use a lot of different registrars; the support I’ve received at NameSilo is top-notch.

As for the process of actually registering your domain name it’s really easy and not very different from buying anything online, but to take away any questions or confusions I’ve included a quick video that walks you step by step through the process of registering a new domain at NameSilo for you to watch:

Do I Need Web Hosting For My Domain?

This is another of those tricky questions because there are services you can use out there which aren’t “web hosting” in the traditional sense, for example WordPress.com or WIX to name just two.

Services like these are intended to be easy-button solutions and while they aren’t technically web hosting services, they do in fact host your website and files.

The problem with services like this is two-fold. First, the only real easy-button they’re providing is saving you the last two steps of this simple three step guide. That may be of value but it does come at a cost of trading lots of control over your site and files and freedom to do as you wish with your website as it grows.

True web hosting is going to be priced about the same when you’re starting out as any of these types of services will, though if your website grows traditional hosting will almost always be more economical for you in the long haul, plus it’s going to allow you to build out your website in whatever way you want without restricting you in the design, features, and content the way that most of these easy-button solutions will.

You should look around, experiment, and find what’s going to work best for you. My advice is always to go with a true web hosting account and have full control over your website.

Since the topic of this posting is setting up a website on your own domain and with your own web hosting account, I’m going to continue from here assuming you won’t be using one of these easy-button services.

2. Getting Hosting

Hosting service can be pretty subjective, however it does happen to be a topic I know a good deal about considering it’s one of the web services my company offers to our clients.

If you’ve looked around or read several other blog postings on getting started with a website, you’ve probably noticed one particular host being mentioned over and over.

I won’t say anything negative about anyone here but I believe it’s fair to mention that this one particular host pays one of the highest affiliate commissions to people who push their service in the industry. I’ve never used their service so can’t speak honestly on it.

The service I use personally and for client’s projects of all sizes (for obvious reasons) is BanProNET and I whole-heartedly recommend the service without any hesitations. We’ve been up and running since 2002, providing safe, fast, and reliable service continually.

A great value ($2.75 a month for the smallest plan at the time of this writing), all the features you could want or ask for in the account control panel, free SSL included with every account (this is vital), comprehensive web stats, and first-rate support technicians (and believe me I put them to the test often).

You can use any hosting service you want or prefer, and what follows in this posting will still be relevant and apply as long as they use the cPanel control panel (the vast majority of web hosts do), but if you want my suggestion again it would be BanProNET, start with the smallest plan and if your website grows you can always upgrade as needed.

Setting Up Your NameServers:

Once you’ve purchased hosting your hosting service will provide you with several (usually 2 or 4) NameServers to set with your domain registrar. This is an easy setting to change on your domain and I’ve provided a slider of screenshots here to walk you through it. Just login to NameSilo (if you registered your domain elsewhere the process will be the same but the screens and links will be different) and go to your account page, then follow along with these 3 slides:

Create An Email Account:

While not absolutely necessary it’s always a good idea to at least create a webmaster@YOURDOMAIN email account to have for installing WordPress and separating the technical admin from your normal user account on the site.

Here’s another quick video that walks you through the process of setting up an email account through your cPanel control panel and then accessing it online:

Install Let’s Encrypt SSL Through cPanel:

BanProNET offers free SSL but if you use any other hosting service (hopefully it’s one that provides free SSL certificates via Let’s Encrypt) you can easily create and install the certificate following the process displayed in this short video:

3. Install WordPress

CPanel (with Softaculous) provides an easy-button approach to quickly installing and setting up WordPress on your domain that requires zero technical skills. Here’s a short video that walks you through the simple process.

That’s it, you’ve now got a domain name, hosting and WordPress up and running.

Now you’ll want to login to your WordPress dashboard and select a theme (web design) to use, and install useful plugins to enhance your site with. These are topics for future postings here.

If you’ve found this guide helpful, run into trouble following it, or spotted any errors please comment below and let me know. I will respond to any comments or questions I receive.

Welcome to O`Bannon’s Leap! It seems like everybody always deletes the initial “Hello World” posting created with a new installation of WordPress, but I thought why do that? Is there any better way to launch a blog, which is a social site by its nature, than to say hello and introduce myself?

So who am I and why am I blogging?

It’s kind of funny, but I’ve wanted to keep a ‘personal’ blog for a long time. Seriously, I bought this domain name for that purpose all the way back in 2006.

However, as I’m sure most can relate to, life and work often have other plans for us and while I did sit down to launch this blog many times over the years I’ve never been able to truly commit to it until now.

Since 2002 I’ve been the owner of Bannon Productions. A web services company providing a wide range of services and products to primarily small business clients.

If you really want to know more about Bannon Productions or my work experience then I invite you to visit https://scottbannon.com.

The summary is that I have over 16 years of working in web technologies, programming in various languages, have worked on the (re)designing of countless websites for hobbyists and international organizations, and grown a business that began with a single server into a global network co-locating in seven data centers spread across three continents. 

Gosh writing that feels like I’m applying for a job, but what I hope is that it will translate into my being able to share valuable knowledge and tips and even some tutorials along the way that is helpful to others.

Which brings me to why I’ve wanted to run a personal blog for so long: because when you work in a tech field you suddenly become the go-to guy for family and friends with all things technology related, just as when you own a small business that makes it past the two year mark and earns profits you suddenly become the go-to guy for those same folks with questions on earning extra money, side hustles, and questions on launching a new business.

And of course when you own a successful business that’s in a tech-related field, well you’re the guy for all of it.

I love that I have been able to answer so many questions and helped quite a few to turn their ideas or desires into reality over the years when they came to me, and that’s why for a dozen-plus years now since I purchased the OBannonsLeap domain name I’ve wanted to make a blog where I could suggest solid resources and talk about some of these things in a practical and real-world kind of way.

What do I mean by practical and real-world?

Here comes my “kid from the streets of Pittsburgh” nature shining through, but hey that’s who I am.

Look, the Internet is full of folks with advice on everything, and whatever you search for often it’s great advice you’ll find (Google does a good job at lifting up quality overall). But, it’s also often self-serving or slanted to benefit some cause or ideology, or even a specific group of people.

A perfect example of this is if you’re looking for information on creating a simple web page layout for a landing page to capture visitor’s email addresses. For a home or small business person, you don’t want (or need) to dive into the very deep wells of web tech and coding standards and best practices. You just want something that lets you accomplish your task and to move on.

CSS Grid is a perfect tool for such a layout, but when you look it up you’re going to find tons of information and how-to’s that go so far beyond your basic needs it’s bound to frustrate and discourage you.

Now, I’m all for using best practices and adhering to coding standards, and if this were a topic I was blogging on I’d certainly link out to such useful information as well, but my main focus would be on the simple way to use it so that you can complete your task and get on with your day.

Someone who sells shoes or operates an eBay drop-shipping side-hustle doesn’t want or need to know the best practices and coding standards behind HTML 5 or CSS 3, they just need simple advice on getting customer’s names and email addresses onto their newsletter lists.

There’s often a disconnect between the deep and the necessary with things like this and I hope that’s a void I can fill for readers here.

Why now?

I’ve said why I’ve put off launching this blog for a dozen years so I should explain what’s changed that I have the opportunity now.

Basically, I’ve pulled back from work recently. Over the last few years my mother has had several life-threatening medical conditions. She’s recovering though it’s been a very long and slow road for her, but she needs around the clock care and monitoring.

Fortunately (and I am blessed in this), I was in a position where I could step back from being hands-on with the day to day of my business and focus on being there for her.

I have found myself with brief periods of free time throughout the days and evenings, and so I thought finally getting to this blog was a great way to use those windows of time. 

So, welcome again to my blog, and please use the comments below to say “hi” back, or tell me if there are specific topics you’d like me to cover here.