Best techniques For EMD Ranking in 2013

[StephenForde]

OK. I know some will say "same as any other SEO". But I am keen to get one of my sites ranking for it's EMD. Nothing I do seems to be working at all. As far as I can tell it's not even in the top 100. Because the site is managed for a business, it needs income. I've managed to increase it's ranks in some low terms.

[David_ODonnell]

Honestly, that site is poorly optimised. I wouldn't be surprised if you earn an over optimisation penalty, or already have one.

There are 17 occurances of 'timber Melbourne' on the homepage.

The site is not written for humans, first sentence on the homepage, "We sell Timber Melbourne Wide. Timber Melbourne are the  Melbourne Timber Specialists"

That is really bad.

Step one would be to re-write the content for humans, then revisit the on-page SEO, like titles, metas, alt tags etc. Then have a look at the UX, it's really hard to read the content on that background.

Lots of work to do here my friend, I suggest reading the SEOmoz beginners guide to SEO first though.

Good luck.

[EGOL]

All of my important domains are EMDs.

I think that the hyphen stinks up the value.

I had a key-word.com, acquired the keyword.com, redirected the key-word.com to the keyword.com, and rankings immediately went up.   Immediately.  As soon as the 301 took hold.

And..... Yes, you rank them just like you would any other website.  Duh.

They are not secret bullets.  You can have an EMD and still get your ass kicked.

They are most valuable in low competition.   When you enter moderate to high competition SERPs their value is not much more than any other domain.  This tells me that the value of an EMD is something like +10 instead of the 10X that most people think.

Also, if you have a site with a strong history and lots of domain queries, redirecting it to an EMD could result in a rankings drop.  Why? The strong history and the domain queries could be worth more than the small EMD bonus.

[StephenForde]

Timber Melbourne is the business name...

[David_ODonnell]

Good observations in regard to EMDs in general. However, if you take a look at the site in question, I think you'll agree the OP needs to do a lot of work on the site regardless of the fact that it's an EMD.

[David_ODonnell]

Seems to be a number of Timber businesses at that address...

Regardless, 17 occurrences is going to set off some red flags.

Just trying to help you out with your query.

[StephenForde]

Thanks David, much appreciated.