Formerly Flagstone Search Marketing | Hello, World! Sort of.

FlagstoneSearchMarketing.com has officially moved to Flagstone.io.

So, I got pretty darn tired of typing flagstonesearchmarketingdotcom into the browser bar, spelling it out over the phone, and giving people my email and having to apologize for the laboriousness of it, "Sorry, I know it's a long one." Plus, I was frequently called "Flagstone Research Marketing" even by people who know me well.

Not good.

Also, I wanted to build a website with the Hubspot CMS. (Read more here: Why I’m Switching Myself (and All of My Clients) From WordPress to HubSpot)

When I first purchased the domain name in 2011, exact match domains were a thing, a viable SEO strategy, for a nascent business.

Back in those days, we wore onions on our belts and SEO firms of yore might advise you on why you should use one. What is an exact match domain? An EMD is a domain name that exactly matches the keyword you want to rank for. If you’re trying to rank for the keyword “birmingham bankruptcy attorney,” your EMD would be none other than, birminghambankruptcyattorney.com.

Woof.

So, Google would give a big rankings boost to domains that exactly matched keywords. If alabamaseofirm.com was taken, companies might go for alabamaseofirm.net or alabamaseofirm.info, just to get the coveted domain match and try to show up on the first page of search results for that keyword.

Hyphens were often saviors of a lost cause, enabling domain names like alabama-seo-firm.com and alabama-seofirm.com… ad nauseum.

All that is say, the free EMD ride came to an end in 2012 with one of Google's algorithmic updates. And my long-ass URL got more annoying with each passing year.

So, here we are with the short, succinct, and aesthetic flagstone.io.

And I'm keeping the Robot Dude from the old website (with the old logo) because ... why not?