Recently in strategy Category

Darius Monsef of COLOURlovers puts together a great set of lessons on the trials and tribulations of building an online community (with some offline lessons as well).  His article is posted on the whimsically named siliconflorist.com.  I learned a lot of this by trial and error.   Good readin'.

Lesson: You must grow within your community, especially in the early days. Later, leaders will arise who can handle some of the day-to-day things and welcome new members. But in those first few days, weeks and months… you are the welcoming committee, janitor, house mom, judge, jury and banninator.

An artist here in Ojai inquired about some web marketing assistance.  I had a hard time pinpointing exactly where he was going to get the most bang for his buck.

Search engine optimization probably won't help much because an artist has very little textual content on the pages.  We could do some standard link building, but its fairly expensive and I don't think its going to have the kind of impact we'd both like to see for his site. 

So I recommended that his best bet right now is to concentrate on social media, particularly social networking sites that focus on artists.  Basically, an artist need to sell himself through his imagery, and traditional search engine optimization doesn't really cut it - an artist is better off seeking the communities where people are looking for art.

I did some research and found the following online communities that are chock-full of artists. 

Maccaca
Amateur Illustrator
MyArtInfo
ArtUproar
deviantART
Saatchi Gallery
Bebo
Ning Artist Search
Social Media SUPER List
ArtFlock.com (added 01/25/08)
Folio Link (fee)
ArtSpan (fee)

For an artist's own site, even without a lot of text, there are still some opportunities for visibility on the web.  Be sure to name the files intuitively, and use the available attributes in the image tag (alt="" and title="").  This should increase visibility in Google Images and other image searches.

A client has two domains pointed at the same website.  My company recently did a couple months of link building on Domain2, which should continue to add backlinks (incoming links from other sites) over the next few months.  A little comparison:

Domain1
0 backlinks - Google
11 backlinks - Yahoo (try Yahoo Site Explorer)
27 backlinks - Altavista
Pages indexed in Google: 2
Google page rank: 1
Time online: 8 years, 8 months, 27 days

Domain2
1 backlink - Google
33 backlinks - Yahoo (try Yahoo Site Explorer)
59 backlinks - Altavista
Pages indexed in Google: 2
Google page rank: 1
Time online: 8 years, 8 months, 27 days

The second domain (remember, same site, same content) is stronger in terms of its ability to rank for targeted keyword phrases.  But Google doesn't look kindly on duplicate content, and so it appears both domains are being penalized to a large degree.  A site that has been around 8 years and has a nice handful of incoming links should be (1) fully indexed and (2) competitive for some key terms if the site has even a modest bit of optimization working (which it does).

So what's the solution?  If the client were to "permanently redirect" (aka 301 redirect) Domain1 to Domain2, then all of those incoming links would be combined into one domain, and Google wouldn't see duplicate content, which should lead to a fully indexed site fairly quickly.  From there, a greater effort can be made to create new content for the site and to do some search engine optimization.

Also of note is that Google distinguishes between www.domain.com and domain.com.  Applying a 301 redirect to one of those (i.e. directing domain.com to www.domain.com) would also help consolidate incoming links and "Google juice."

Some more reading on the subject:
Using multiple domains can screw up your search engine rankings
Ethical SEO
Merging Sites (Search Engine Watch Forums)
Duplicate content in the search engines

A client called me today to get some thoughts on starting a new website using one of two existing domains that both point to the same site.  The existing site will be remodeled into a direct-to-client ecommerce site that does not need any search engine presence, and the new one will be the marketing site.  The domain that has more longevity, authority, incoming links and other attributes that will reinforce the search engine optimization process is the one we want to use for the marketing site.

Matt at SEObook.com (the kick-ass SEO guide) hosts a nice little domain information tool called Xinu.  You can use it to analyze your site or your competitor's sites.  It provides you information on backlinks, social bookmarks, pagerank and some other nice metrics for comparison, along with links to see where the data is coming from.  Using Xinu, we were able to identify which domain was stronger, and proceed accordingly.