SEO and the 3 critical factors in a domain name.
NOTE: SEO is the acronym for: ’search engine optimization’. This is the process of making your web pages more search engine ‘friendly’ by tweaking code and content.
Choosing a proper domain name can have a huge impact in terms of how it affects your positions in the search engines and your overall traffic.
THE 3 CRITICAL FACTORS
- The domain name should contain key words.
- The domain name should be as short as possible – easy to remember and easy to type in.
- The domain name is slightly better off as a .com over say a .net, org etc …
1. KEY WORDS IN YOUR DOMAIN NAME
No one knows the exact algorithms that the search engines use to determine who ranks higher. But you can learn a lot when you have several websites that get a lot of traffic …
One thing I have discovered over the years, is that keywords in a domain name do have a serious impact as far as the search engines are concerned. That said, MSN seems to hold it as being more important than the other 2 major search engines: Google and Yahoo!
The point is that you should start your SEO (search engine optimization) work BEFORE you even register your domain name. Try to choose a domain that contains a good keyword.
2. SHORT DOMAIN NAMES ARE EASY TO REMEMBER
I think this one is obvious … if your domain name is:
www.fantabulousefluffyregistereddogs.com
… chances are people will have a hard time remembering it! Instead something like ‘www.fandogs.com’ would be much better.
3. WHY ARE .COM DOMAINS BETTER?
Less to do with search engines and everything to do with the fact that most people will type in ‘.com’ before .net or anything else.
For that reason alone, try to register a .com before anything else.
Stefan Mischook
May 16th, 2006 at 9:34 pm
I have been using SEO off of thsi website and a few others. I have a website that sells indoor tanning lotion and tanning beds.
I have rapidly moved up the line in all of the major search engines. Thanks
October 5th, 2006 at 12:31 pm
Domain names are more important for SEO than ever today (October 05, 2006). The reason is that search engines have had to discount more and more on-page factors due to webmasters and their SEO efforts to get top ranking.
With less factors to rank webpages with, search engines are looking for other things to base a website rank in their search results. In-bound links were what made Google what it is today, but even they are discounted now due to webmasters linking to everything they can find to increase their PageRank. But that is another story.
MSN understands this and ranks a website with a keyword phrase within the domain name well ahead of other sites. For example, I registered a domain name (american-pitbulls.us) for a pitbull site and setup a blog about six months ago. Three months later I did a search on MSN for ‘american pitbulls’ and my blog came up #1! (Page 1 of 70,571 results)
Keep this in mind… The site had:
No PageRank
A new domain name, 3 months old then
No links
No SEO – a WordPress Blog
The blog is still at #1 on MSN today ahead of all 70k sites. Feel free to check yourself..
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=american+pitbulls&FORM=MSNH
The url is http://american-pitbulls.us/wp
I’m getting traffic from Google as well now. Anyway, you can see how important the domain name is in ranking well in MSN. Even at third in the search engine wars, MSN can push out a lot of traffic.
Robert McCulloch
December 22nd, 2007 at 12:28 pm
I think you’re points are valid however i think given the choice for #3 you should choose your domain extension rather wisely. Of course .com domains are definately better than .net etc however if you are (for example) targetting the uk market, then a .co.uk extension is most definately better for achieving more targetted traffic through the search engines; combine this with location specific hosting and you can definately add some highly positive seo through your domain name.