Website Search Engine Optimisation - Choosing Good Domain Names
A Beginners Guide by Brian Cotsen

A well chosen domain name can have great benefits to the effectiveness of your websites Search Engine Optimisation.

Choosing the right domain name, from the search engines point of view, should be one of the most important decisions you make when choosing what your website will be called and how people will find you.

Though a memorable domain name can help in human marketing, don't forget that your website will be visited by the robot spiders of the search engines.

Make sure that your domain name works well for both your human and robot visitors.

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The Website Domain Name

Many website owners give very little thought to this most important of factors in SEO.

To be a little more accurate, they give lots of thought but not the right thought!

Most website owners consider the following:

• Is the name clever?
• Is it catchy?
• Is it memorable?
• Is it available?

 

But the most important thing that they should be considering is:

• Does it use any of my important keywords?
• Will it mean anything to the search engines?
• Will it mean anything to my human visitors?

 

You see the websites like 'Google', 'Yahoo', 'ebay' are the oddities that prove the point.

These websites did not become famous because of the name, the name became famous because of the website.

For Most website owners a simple website name that uses one two or at best three of your keywords will be far more useful to gaining good search engine rankings.

If I were considering buying a domain for my new website, then I would definitely look at the options of using a domain name which includes one or more of my keywords.

Include keywords in your domain name

Search engines have to find a way into your website and no matter how they find you either via a link to your front/ home page or to a page deeper in your website, they have to follow your domain name.

With Psychotherapycity, the Psychotherapy website of Amanda Falkson, search engines might go to the home page. www.psychotherapycity.co.uk or they might follow a link that they found from one of the many articles written by Amanda to an internal page such as www.psychotherapycity.co.uk/counselling-therapy-support.htm

 

Either way the search engine will read the first part of the domain name, the root, as psychotherapy & city.

This is great news for Amanda as her target market is professional business people looking for psychotherapy services in the City of London.

So the search engines will already be fully aware that this site may be about 'psychotherapy' & 'city'.

 

Avoid hyphens, misspellings & numbers if possible

I always recommend that if you can, avoid hyphens, misspellings & numbers where ever possible.

Why not hyphens?

Consider Abode Design a real website I worked on.

Their website address is www.abode-design.co.uk Unfortunately many people type in www.abodedesign.co.uk. This is really unfortunate as they are both competing for the same market.

• People forget to type them in and then either don't find your site or find someone else's.
• You have to stress the 'Hyphen' when ever you tell people about the website.
• Other people, with the same website name but no hyphen, could benefit from your hard marketing work.

 

Why not misspellings?

Consider a website selling mirrors that decided to call itself 'www.thruthelookingglass.com'

• Will everyone misspell the word 'thru' correctly?
• When people search they don't use misspellings - so you lose the SEO benefit.
• Misspellings can't be heard - so if you are being interviewed on the radio or in public, how do you tell people that they need to type your website name in a particular way, without it sounding odd?

 

Why not numbers

I registered a site called www.5ten15.com but realised that people might think it was:

• www.five10fifteen.com
• www.51015.com
• www.fivetenfifteen.com
• etc

I realised that I would end up having to buy huge numbers of domains and point them to the correct domain to capture all the stray attempts to get to my website.

• Also search engines wouldn't have anything to read and understand about the website in the domain name.

 

Choose .com extensions if possible

Even if you're not going for a global audience it is worth trying to buy the .com extension of your domain name.

• .coms are the most memorable.
• .coms don't suggest any country so they feel more universal.
• .coms are not ignored by search engines trying to filter out foreign countries.

Rightly or wrongly .coms remain the favourite extension of all because they offer universal appeal.

Avoid:

• .net
• .biz
• .uk.com and other national extensions followed by .com

Unfortunately no one remembers these and will always try the .com first.

For more on choosing great domain names see other articles in the 'Building Websites That Work' section.

Also take a look at this clear and easy to understand article at www.thesitewizard.com

Next lets take a look at the importance of the 'Title Tag' in Search Engine Optimisation

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