Choosing a Domain Name for SEO

Choosing the domain name is quite a tricky affair. It represents your business and unless you are as successful as Amazon.com where the title has nothing to do with e-commerce; you could be stuck with a loser. The people may not even visit your site if the domain name is complicated. The golden rule is keep it short, so that it is easy to remember.

What’s in a Name

Often catchy domain names stick out in the users memory and seem to be preferred with the users. But two very useful tips are

  • Try to keep the suffix as .com as it is widely accepted. Google has at times removed all .info domains from their results, but then brought them back. Using anything other than a .com or .net could give you these headaches in the future. Though depending upon the target country, you can have .uk or .in
  • The domain name should attract people when you broadcast it on offline marketing channels and when you are placing the domain links in certain items. Catchy, easy to read, and easy to remember.

Shorter is better

The shorter names stick out and they are easy to write down on the address bar.Keep it simple and short. No one wants to visit www.thelongestdomainnameintheworld.com to see your site.  Though you have to be careful, the site name should not be too small, things like “My1.com” does not really measure up to anything.

At the same time, you might have domain names which are already taken. An Indian airline company could not use its name as it was already taken by an unrelated business; but the addition of the word fly in flykingfisher.com made the domain name perfect for an Airline. So a creative touch should never be ruled out.

Keyword Rich is Best

I do not believe that you should have your company name as the URL. Most websites do this, but there is no real need for it. A search engine will use the domain name as one of many calculations for ranking websites. Having a keyword rich url is much better than your company name.

If two websites have the exact same content, the exact same products, the exact amount of links, and the only differentiation between the two sites is the domain name, the site with the keyword rich url will rank higher.

The only major caveat to this is that a lot of the good domain names are taken. Use hyphens if you can, or other keywords you wish to rank, but make sure the url is relevant to your business as a whole. If you want, buy both a keyword rich url as well as your company name url, and redirect the company url to the website. The main url should be that keyword rich name.

If the name of your company is keyword rich, you are good to use a mixture of the keywords you are targeting and your company name, such as RichardsBlueBicycles.com. Using just the name of the business that doesn’t really explain or describe the business is not beneficial for you. Keywords in the domain name are just one small piece of the ranking puzzle, but every little bit counts, right?

Five Characteristics of a Strong Domain Name

  • Unique
  • Easy To Spell
  • Easy To Remember
  • Pronounceable
  • Short

Next week I will discuss the pros and cons of buying an existing domain name, and some places that offer these services.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing • SEO

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