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Don’t you just hate it when someone comes to you and says, “I’m ready to start my search engine optimization campaign now. I want to optimize for [combination of three letters].”

Based on the English alphabet of 26 letters, there are 17,576 possible 3-letter combinations. You would think there might be some room for query building in that list but if there is it won’t be easy to find. I ran a quick search on Google Trends for the first five 3-letter acronyms and all show active queries.

Does that mean you cannot optimize for the high-demand “aae” term? Of course not. I’m sure there are many people outside of endodontists and the members of the American Academy of English who want to see their businesses rank first for “aae” — why discourage them from trying?

I randomly picked some other three-letter combinations, like “RCW”. I was expecting to find some company with a record player or something ranking for that position. Instead I got the Revised Code of Washington (state) — with sitelinks, no less. I guess they get a lot of inbound links, especially Title 9A (which defines criminal behavior).

Just under the Washington State Code Theft and Robbery alone you find dozens of definitions for crimes against the state (of Washington). The first section defines various terms and then you find a library-like breakdown of illegal activities such as theft in various degrees, extortion, possessing stolen property, shopping cart theft, fraud, and even “retail theft with extenuating circumstances”.

Notice the stemming in the breadcrumbs. For example, in the listing for Extortion in the second degree, the root URL has anchor text of “RCWs” (which, by the way, leads to a page that is not shown in Google’s search results).

One might ask how the Washington state government site manages to rank so well for “RCW” if its own internal references through links don’t target the specific three-letter acronym. The same page ranks first (with sitelinks) for “RCWS” — maybe that’s a clue to how powerful internal linkage can be (the government page also ranks first in the inanchor:rcws query. Clearly, some people might argue, either Google is using stemming or there are links pointing to that site which just use “RCW” in the anchor text.

One possibility to consider is that linking with just the URL may pass the three letters because of the slashes in the URL. So the state of Washington may have figured out that you can embed the keywords anywhere in the URL (I’ve been saying this for years). This page also links to another section on the state government site which ranks well for “WAC”.

Not that we should all run out and add subdirectories to our sites that claim three-letter keywords, but this is an area of search optimization that people have poo-pooed and laughed at and sneered and snickered over.

Maybe we should all get together and link to http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/RCW in the hope that an almost neutral page will jump up in the search results. Not that I want to see the Revised Washington Code vanish from the SERPs — quite the opposite. It’s refreshing to actually see a useful resource ranking first in a highly competitive query space.

SERP quality teasing aside, the search engine made some choices but there are reasons for those choices. There is a psychology behind every competitive search result.

The other thing to consider here is that for some acronyms, like DNA, there is really no authoritative body, trademark or service mark owner, or any entity that has an inherently better right to rank for that expression than anyone else. Notice which site ranks first for “DNA”.

Except for the fact that Wikipedia’s “facts” are constantly changing, that would almost make sense (but imagine all the bets that have been won and lost on the basis of what Ickipedia says at any point in time for which, if they were revisited now or later, the results have or will change).

911 is another query where the search results are questionable — but for an entirely different reason. Suppose you’re writing a research paper, report, or news article about the 911 service — how long will it take you to realize you need to search for “911 service” to get the background information you need, rather than just “911″? Should we really believe that the September 11 attacks have completely outshadowed the importance of the 9-1-1 telephone service? (Oh — hey, you can search for “9-1-1″.)

Did you know that if you insert hyphens (aka dashes) between the “RWC” letters you get completely different search results? The Rugby World Cup ranks first on Google. A couple of colleges also rank for that expression. Wouldn’t you love to be the marketing guy developing a campaign to promote “letter” + “hyphen” + “letter” + “hyphen”? That’s part of the solution, of course — building visibility and brand awareness for the queries where you do rank.

Ultimately, you can work on 3-letter acronyms and pull some options out of the woodwork but putting all your search eggs into that one basket is a pretty deep risk. You’re betting the farm on a single roll of the dice. Acronymic name spaces work very differently from expression-based name spaces — and that was really the case before Web search evolved. If people are searching for acronyms, they have something specific in mind. You have to ensure you rank for the most relevant acronymic name space because otherwise you may find a lot of disinterested traffic hitting your server.

There are over 70,000 variations on 3-letter acronyms. You can add another 4,000 variations on numbers (000,0-0-0,0-00,00-0). And if you combine letters and digits then you’re looking at 186,000+ available combinations — but you still have to think about brand and service mark confusion, consumer identification of specific acronyms with certain concepts, and what the search engines may conclude is more relevant solely on the basis of linkage.

It’s not easy to get control over a 3-letter domain name so you’re almost certainly going to have to rely on page URLs for creating brandable Web destinations. Your internal linkage can help you, but ultimately you may have to capture a lot of off-site references. Instead of asking for anchor text, the way to go may be to ask people to link to the brandable URL. The shorter your URL is, the more likely people will be to link TO it and WITH it. You at least have that much going for you with 3-letter acronym SEO.

One of the latest “hot” topics in SEO blogging today seems to be the old “how to get one way links” trick. And I do mean “trick”.

About all you can expect from any blog post that uses “how to get one way links” as a title is a generic “submit your site to directories”. But most of these one way link building posts don’t even bother to mention specific directories.

That’s not very helpful, is it?

Well, here are three ways to get one-way links.

Method One – Pick a famous dead author for whom there are many fan Web sites. Write a blog post claiming to be a better writer than that author. Richard K. Morgan used the old Flame-bait tactic to draw Tolkien fans out of the woodwork (and I was probably the only one who used “rel=’nofollow’” to link to his post). Terry Pratchett has taken pot-shots at Tolkien, too. Not that I think people should start claiming to be better writers than Tolkien but writing shallow, minimalist reviews of successful fiction without actually getting your facts right is a sure-fire way to get blogs and forums lighting up with links pointing toward your post.

Method Two – Be the first to point out the obvious in an off-handed way. It helps to already have a regular audience that comes equipped with their own blogs and forums. It’s not that you’re pointing out the obvious that gets you the links — it’s that you’re making so little of it that people stop and think, “Wait — that is significant”. If you employ humor or exasperation you increase your chances of getting links (and being copied).

My most widely copied article was titled “Legolas, you’re just so darned…CUTE”. It earned lots of links. The whole point of the article was to document the hundreds of emails I had received from girls and women around the world about how hot Orlando Bloom was after the first “Lord of the Rings” movie premiered in December 2001. Even grand-mothers were going nuts over the Elf-boy. I was just pointing out the obvious but only because it had hit me over the head like a ton of bricks. It was a bit exasperating.

Method Three – Publish an RSS feed. It seems like the more feeds you publish, the more one-way links you get. Now, some people might argue that you get those links from scraper sites, but I think there is a sub-culture of RSS feed addicted bloggers who don’t actually surf the Web. They are too busying feed-reading and reblogging to actually care what is happening on the Web. They live on the World Wide Feedstream.

Confession. I admit it. Those are not my best ideas for getting one-way links. I have written about How To Get One Way Links before. I just wanted to put up something other than a title of “How to Get One Way Links” accompanied by empty “submit your site to directories” advice.

The real secret to getting one way links is to create something unique and valuable for each site from which you want links. Yeah, I’m talking about content. You’d be amazed at how many sites would welcome your free content, especially if it’s written just for them. A lot of those sites will give you one way links in return for that content.

So you’re all set. You have the concept for your web property and you’re ready to build. There is just one more thing, the domain name. Seems pretty straight forward doesn’t it? You just call it your company name. What if your company name is Acidophilus Research Incorporated or you don’t have a company?

I’d like to take you through a mock brainstorming session similar to ones our team has internally when qualifying potential domain names for new websites. You may discover during the process that people working on the same project have radically different interpretations of the objectives a site seeks to accomplish.

Does the domain have parasitical value?

Parasitical value refers to gleaning spiffs in the form of traffic, ranking or general interest by analyzing and mimicking successful query trends in your domain. Seeking parasitical value can be extremely useful when building smaller websites designed to “take a portion of the existing pie” through long tail, albeit more obscure, query terms.

The idea is to look at what is already being searched for under your topic structure and align existing interest with your content. Stay away from terms that are too competitive and make sure there is an overlap between the selected term and your site’s overall objective.

Examples of domains with parasitical value:

wholesale-candy-store.com
candystorecandy.com
sugar-candy-store.com

Does the domain have brand value?

A domain’s brand value refers largely to the human intuitive element. How will the domain be identified, remembered, referred to, passed along and searched for? As far as domains are concerned, brand value is best pursued when seeking user loyalty.

Brand value is key in marketing and as such needs to be easy to remember. Traditionally the trendier the better but be careful! Creating a brand in the world of web 2.0 can be a double edged sword. With a thousand new startups a day capturing every snappy little phonic available it may become difficult for the masses to distinguish their Iubo’s from their Sampa’s. If you don’t remember it, nobody else will either.

Examples of domains with brand value:

twitter.com
theonion.com
digg.com

Things to avoid when choosing a domain name:

1. Don’t end a word and start the next word with the same letter. (e.g. spellinggnat.com) You will find much of your traffic falling to (spellingnat.com).
2. Don’t just take the alternate .tld of a successful brand. (e.g. ebay.net) You run the risk of being litigated. Plus this is just lazy.
3. With few exceptions, don’t make domains too long. (e.g. wouldyoureallyremembersomethingthislong.com)
4. Don’t sub odd characters for letters. (e.g. 0ddl0vew0rd5.com)
5. With few exceptions, don’t chop all the words and string them together to shorten your domain. (e.g. Decorative Paint Store to decpaisto.com)

What about cases where there is a company name but it is excessively long?

Let’s take the sample at the beginning of this post (Acidophilus Research Incorporated) ewww. How can we shorten this up? Query data shows that there seems to be a lot of people searching for “acidophilus” but it also shows that a lot of people are searching for “acidophillus” and “asidophilus” which tells us that people are having a hard time spelling acidophilus. Possible synonyms could be bacteria, micro organisms, microbes orrrrrr germs. The word “incorporated” is not succinct or descriptive so let’s leave it off. Ideally you would carry your, now shortened, word combination through another round of keyword research.

Possible solutions:

germresearch.com
germscience.com
microbugs.com

Whatever you choose, make sure your domain is punchy, pertinent, succinct and above all else relevant in concept or principle to the purpose of your subject matter. That pertinence combined with a little parasitical and brand value will go a long way towards establishing your web property as a presence people will recognize and seek out.

Definition: A blog channel is an RSS feed or content derived from an RSS feed the brings you content from 2 or more blogs.

Blog channels are underutilized. We could even say they are underappreciated and undervalued. In fact, blog channels are just about under- everything. I don’t know of an easy way to create a blog channel — at least not a useful one.

Blogrush offered people an opportunity to sort of participate in a massive blog channel but it was not very well refined.

Some sites treat their blog as the channel itself. They might have a video channel, a blog channel, maybe a Twitter channel, etc. In this sense, where they are categorizing content by type, their use o channel is acceptable but underwhelming.

The people who have made the most use of (and derived the most benefit from) blog channels are AdSpam Web site operators who aggregate other people’s blog posts in their own “blogs” and “forums”. But these are still crude examples of blog channels.

A blog channel should ideally be a widget or plug-in where you add a window to your CMS (or static HTML page) and you choose which blogs will be featured in it. You should have the freedom to specify how many blog links appear at a time and whether you include some text snippets.

Think of a blog channel as a blogroll on steroids. It’s pointing people to your favorite blogs and helping to promote those blogs’ latest posts.

Another way a blog channel could work would be to funnel individual posts, tags, or categories into the display queue. You could do this with one blog (but would that make sense for most blogs?) although it should be done for many blogs. Unless you’re tying a blog in to another site.

Suppose you have an ecommerce site, for example. You COULD just drop an RSS feed display window on every page, but you could also craft a channel from your blog to each section where the blog channel is relevant to that section.

Think of blog channels as tools to augment, supplement, and complement your primary content regardless of whether it’s a blog site or some other type of site. Blog channels should offer a variety of articles that are relevant to whatever is on the page.

It’s great if the content is indexable (that is common with mashup pages) but you can implement it through Javascript or Flash if that’s easier for you. The visitor experience should come first.

Visible Technologies is closed for Presidents Day. The Best SEO Blog will resume posting later this week.

We hope you have a safe and happy Presidents Day.