Here are three ways you can help prevent your website from going offline:

1. Register your domain name for at least five years.
You don’t own your domain name forever. The last thing you want to happen is wake up one morning and find that someone else has purchased your domain name—I’ve seen it happen! When registering your domain name, make sure you have it for at least 5 years. Personally, I think 10 years is an even better idea. If you are serious about building and growing your business you’ll probably be at it for at least the next decade. Schedule some kind of reminder down the road so you don’t forget when your domain registration is set to expire.

2. Make sure your credit card and contact information is up to date.
One of my former SEO clients called me in a panic one day because they had been locked out of their website by the hosting company. The registration period had ended and the credit card the hosting company had on file was no longer active so they couldn’t automatically renew the registration. Most hosting companies will try to get in contact with you long before registration or your credit card expires, but the person that was the contact on file was no longer with my client’s company. Their email account had been suspended so my client never got any notifications that their domain registration was set to expire! They had also changed phone numbers and failed to update their contact information with the hosting company. Because they forgot to keep tabs on their domain registration and the hosting company wasn’t able to get in touch they lost their website!

3. Create emergency tech support contact list.
Who you gonna call? IT! Everyone in your office should know who to contact in case your site goes down. Whether it is your web developer or hosting company, make sure that tech support contact list is accessible by everyone in your office. If you’re the only one who knows who to contact in case of a tech emergency, what happens if your site goes offline and you’re not in the office? You want to get your site’s technical problems fixed as quickly as possible.

Watch this week’s SEO video lesson!

For more social media marketing lessons from Nick Stamoulis, check out the Brick Marketing social media marketing video lesson archive.

But in the last year or so I’ve noticed a growing trend when it comes to Facebook marketing—companies are giving their Facebook profiles a lot of “face time” on all of their marketing platforms—TV commercials, radio ads and print ads invite consumers to Like a company on Facebook; websites publish big “Find Us on Facebook” banners on prime page real estate and entire marketing campaigns are built with around the goal of getting more Facebook fans. While I think it’s great that so many companies are invested in having a strong social presence, it’s important to remember that every time you promote your Facebook page it’s Facebook that could reap the most benefits in the long run, not necessarily your company. If you’re not careful, your Facebook marketing just markets Facebook!

In my opinion, Facebook is not a place of commerce; people don’t head over to Facebook with the intent to buy. They go to check in with their friends, post funny videos or breaking news, upload photos from their family vacation, plan parties and so forth. Even though Facebook is doing all it can to become a one-stop-online-shop for users it’s still mostly a social site. When you promote your Facebook page, you are encouraging your target audience to check out Facebook INSTEAD of coming to your website. Facebook is the one that benefits from all of your traffic!

Think about it like this—let’s say someone does heed your call-to-action and searches for your company on Facebook. Once they are on your Facebook page, where do they go from there? Sure, they could click over to your website or blog (the end goal of any Facebook marketing campaign), but there are literally dozens of other links on you Facebook page that could take them away from your brand. Never mind the fact that their own profile and home page is just a click away, Facebook also puts ads in the side bar on your page. You might be advertising your own competitors! The last thing any site wants to do is send a targeted customer over to the competition.

Now I am not saying that companies should stop promoting their Facebook profiles altogether. Having a social presence is critical to online success today, and obviously you want to make sure your audience knows where they can find, connect and interact with your brand online. However, I am suggesting that site owners take a good hard look at their Facebook marketing tactics. The end goal should never be just “get more Fans.” You want to use your Facebook profile as a gateway to send more qualified visitors over to your site. Don’t turn Facebook into the end destination otherwise Facebook reaps all the benefits while you do all the work.

While it’s important to publish quality, relevant content, many site owners get so bogged down in their writing that no content actually ends up going live. They agonize over every word choice (and word count) for so long that it stalls their content marketing strategy. In my opinion, there is nothing worse than launching a company blog and then not routinely updating it. A company blog should be updated at least once a week (more frequently if you have the manpower and time) because it gives the search engines more content to index, it gives your visitors more information to digest and helps build your online brand’s authority. If you aren’t producing content, you aren’t reaping any of those benefits!

For site owners that are struggling to get their content “ready” for publication, my advice is not to aim for perfection. If the content is 80% of the way there (meaning it’s on point and relevant to your target audience) then run with it. This is especially important if you are a new company or are in demand generation mode. At this stage in your SEO campaign, you need to be pushing out as much content as possible if you want to help your website effectively compete in the SERPs. You may have created a new lexicon around your brand and products, but that doesn’t mean that users’ search behavior is automatically going to change to reflect that. If you want people to use your new keywords you have to introduce them to your target audience and start making them part of the industry jargon. A few blog posts here and there isn’t going to cut it—you need to publish as much content as you can so as many people as possible can find it.

It’s pretty much understood by everyone that content is the key to online success, and if you’re late to the content marketing game then you have a lot of catching up to do—your competition might have hundreds (if not thousands) of pieces of content working in their favor. All of those pages can be indexed and ranked by the search engines, becoming entry points for your target audience. If you aren’t publishing content then you’ll never be able to compete with the sheer volume of information your competition has created and is leveraging for their SEO.

Watch this week’s SEO video lesson here!

For more link building lessons from Nick Stamoulis, check out the Brick Marketing link building video lesson archive.

Knowing this is an authored link, by a human who they have data about, they can place far more trust in a link. Its [sic] likely that a link authored manually by a human is of higher quality, and that a human is unlikely to claim responsibility for a link if it is spammy.

Furthermore it allows them to change the weighting of links according to the AuthorRank of the author who placed the link.
So authorship markup can help Google clean up the search results and improve their ranking factors, but why should the average site owner bother with authorship markup? How is it going to help their SEO?

As Google said when they announced authorship markup,

…authorship is a great way to identify and highlight high-quality content. Plus, the web is centered around people. People discovering content on the web often want to learn more about its author, see other content by that author, and even interact with the author.

The rel=author markup (which connects to you Google+ account), helps link together all the content that you have created and is scattered across the web. If you’ve been publishing content online for even a few years, chances are you’ve created hundreds of blogs posts, articles, white papers and other pieces of content. Authorship markup tells Google that you are the owner of all of those pieces of content. Since the search engine knows you are the original author, it helps protect any of your content that is scrapped or plagiarized from outperforming your work in the search results.

Since the search results will display your name and picture (pulled from your Google+ profile), users will be able to easily find more of your content in the search results. Having your image attached to a listing also makes that link more dynamic and jump out on the page, helping increase click throughs.

From a link building perspective, the SEOMoz article mentions that “we need a shift in our mindset from where we are getting links from to who we are getting links from.” Since Google is essentially trying to quantify the authority of an author, getting a more trusted author to link to your site is going to be increasingly important. While links from trusted domains are very valuable, getting links from trusted people might be where Google is looking for sites to focus on.

I’ve implemented the rel=author markup on my sites and blogs because I want to make sure my name and content are well connected should Google ever decide to really focus on author authority as a ranking signal. It’s not very hard to implement, and the long terms potential benefits are worth the time spent adding the code.

Too much content for it all to be immediately searchable.
Yes, you can publish a 100 blog posts at once if you want, hoping your content flood will make your website more appealing to the search engines. But guess what? Everyone can do the exact same thing! There is so much content being produced every second of every day (24 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute) that it’s impossible for everyone’s content to be indexed at the same time. The Internet is incredibly fast, and getting faster every day, but simply because of the sheer volume of content being created and published every day there is no guarantee that your content will get picked up first.

The search engines aren’t instant.
The search engines have an indexing process they follow when it comes to ranking content. For site owners that were hit by the first Panda update, some didn’t see an improvement in their site’s analytics for a few months after the update even though they fixed their website immediately. This is because the search engines don’t revisit every page of your site the second you make a change. While this can be very frustrating for site owners because it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where you went wrong, it’s just a fact of SEO life that you have to get comfortable with. You can’t make Google or Bing revisit and index your site any faster, so you better learn to wait!

How trusted is your website?
Your website’s trust factor is big when it comes to dreams of “instantaneous SEO.” For instance, my company website has been online for seven years, and age plays a huge role in determining trust factor. When I publish a new page of content I usually see it ranking in the first few pages of Google in a couple of days for my targeted keywords. I didn’t do anything to make Google favor my new page over some other new page, but because my website is aged Google trusts that this new page is as valuable as some of my older pages. Age is not something you can fake or rush, it just has to happen naturally.