8 Steps to a Successful SEO Campaign: Choosing a Domain Name

Depending on what stage of the process you’re involved at, the domain name may have already been decided. However, if you’re involved with the process before the decision to buy a domain name has been made, then there are several things to consider when purchasing a domain name for best SEO practices:

  • Domain Name Choices
  • Hyphenating Your URLs
  • Originality
  • Commercial or Geographic
  • Short URL


Domain Name Choices

When first searching for a domain name you should always keep in mind search terms, keywords or phrases that will be related to your website. Once you’ve established these you should come up with a list of seven or eight domain name choices. Prioritize by choosing the top three – these three will be your ‘must have’ domain choices. The remaining domains are names you can fall back on or change if your top three choices are all taken.

Unless you want a really-bad-domain-name.info you should register your domain name right away to avoid missing an opportunity. As well as the .com, don’t forget to register the .net, .org and if it applies, the .mobi too. If you’re torn between names you should go ahead and register them all – don’t forget that you can redirect more than one domain name to a website.

Hyphenating Your URLs

Hyphenated domain names have a bad rap, but is the reputation justified? From a usability standpoint, the bad rap is most definitely justified. Having to type in an extra character (that is most likely unnecessary) can be a pain. It also makes verbally explaining your site URL to someone that bit more difficult. Instead of just saying “my domain dot com” you have to say “my (dash) domain (dash) name dot com”. That will get old really quick. Think through your decision carefully. If you still can’t come to a conclusion whether or not to hyphenate, purchase both the unhyphenated URL and the hyphenated version and implement a redirect. Doing this will protect your brand as well as ensuring all visitors who are uncertain about the URL are directed to your site and not a competitors.

However, there are cases where a hyphen would accentuate the content. For instance www.speedofart.com, would be far better with hyphens: www.speed-of-art.com. Now people will have no doubt that the website is about art, and not bodily functions stemming from overly tight swimming trunks. Another example would be www.gotahoe.com. Now, I’m sure Tahoe is a lovely place, but lets not have the URL make like it’s some kind of stripping joint. A much better url would be www.go-tahoe.com or www.go-to-tahoe.com (which is still available by the way).

For maximum URL performance, you should include at least one of your keywords in a hyphenated URL. If we take the Raven URL as an example, we have the hyphenated version http://raven-seo-tools.com, and the unhyphenated URL http://ravenseotools.com (which redirects to the hyphenated URL). We have the product name and two keywords so with hyphens there is the increased likelihood that search engines will see three separate keywords (‘Raven’, ‘SEO’ and ‘Tools’).

Originality

When you think of successful social networking sites, there is one common denominator – their URLs are original and unique. Digg, flickr, ning, Twitter, Mixx, the list is endless. Google is a name we’re all too familiar with, but did you know that the original name, googol was chosen because the term’s meaning is a very large number followed by 100 zeros? Would this be relative at first? Perhaps not, but it certainly is today considering their search domination.

An original name is memorable – people are much more likely to visit your site if they can remember it. Adding content relativity to the url may inspire you to think of some unique domain names. Just because it doesn’t immediately make sense from the outset doesn’t mean that it’s not useful, it just means that no one has figured out a use for it.

Commercial or Geographic Targeting

Living in America, it is obvious to us that a .com is the priority for a TLD (Top Level Domain). But what if your target audience was in Europe or the far east? For those living in the United Kingdom, a .co.uk domain (as well as a .com) would be an absolute priority. Other prominent European domains are .eu, .it, .fr, .es, .de (there are many more). But would choosing a native domain ending help your SEO?

If your site targets users in a particular geographic location, you can use the Google geographic tool (in Webmaster Tools) to determine how your site will appear in country specific SERPs. Sites with country specific domains (.fr for example) are already associated with a geographic region – websites with a neutral TLD like a .com or .org are the websites that will benefit the most should their content be country specific.

Short URL

Research from late 2007 has suggested that short URLs provide a higher click-through in organic search. The long URLs that are present in search listings appear to lead to the next result. Definitely something you don’t want!

If you have dynamic pages, avoid using parameters, variables or session IDs in your URLs. Consider using search engine friendly URLs to limit your parameters and store your session IDs in cookies. Session IDs can often replicate various URLs resulting in multiple listings of the same content in the SERPs.

So you’ve read this article and now you want to see if your chosen domain(s) are available. One of the best places on the internet to do this would be the Whois lookup and domain name search. Using the Whois tools avoids searching for domains at registrar’s websites and running the risk of any domain you searched for being kept and held for ransom.

Filed under: How-To-SEO