With the increasing awareness of the importance of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) for websites, domain names have gained even greater value and relevance towards the efficacy of a website on the Internet.
With Google, in particular, giving weight in search engine results ranking to keywords in domain names, the selection of a good domain name has become crucial. We are providing you with a few tips to follow in the selection of a domain name that will contribute towards increasing your search engine popularity and consequently, your return on investment.
- Give the selection of your website’s domain name some serious thought as you will be buying the name and will want to snag the best domain possible before others have the chance to.
- If you are launching the online presence of a well-established business or organization, you will find it best to use a domain name that includes your off-line business name, such as www.cnn.com.
- If you are a large organization or Web enterprise that is going to be promoted by advertising in the media and word of mouth, choose a unique, easy to remember name like yahoo.com. Creativity in domain names is encouraged as long as it is simple and will attract repeat visitors to your site.
- If you are depending on Internet search engines to attract traffic to your website, you can save large amounts of advertising money by choosing the right domain name. When selecting such a domain name for your website take into consideration the lessons taught by SEO, branding and domaining. An example of this would be taking your chosen keyword and adding another word on the end, (for example: SeoBook, Travelocity, CarHub), as this will retain an element of unique branding for your website while containing SEO value within it. These types of domain names rank well both on the keyword and on the branding scale.
- The vast majority of Internet users access websites for the first time through search engine search. It is known that search engines retrieve sites and pages for specific called keywords according to many different criteria. The pages with the top listings in search engines search results get most of the traffic. Therefore in an effort to increase your search engine ranking choose a domain that includes a keyword that: describes your product or website, is popular in searches, is not listed in too many of your competitors’ domain names. Search domain name providers to make sure that the domain name you have settled upon has not been previously taken. These same providers often suggest other similar domain names that you can select and that are still available.
- Avoid incredibly long, hyphenated, multi-term domain names as they have no branding value and contain limited SEO value. It will also prove difficult for users to remember it for a future visit.
- Select a domain name that people will remember easily from memory.
- A range of standard suffixes for Internet domains exist with the .com one being the most popular. When this suffix is already taken another one can be chosen from the following, amongst others: .biz; .org; .net; .ac; .eu; .us, .co.uk; .com.mt (country specific ones); .gov; .info. Information-specific and non-profit organization websites might find the .org and .info suffixes as being the best to attract people to their sites. Businesses generally utilize the .com and .biz suffixes most often. When searching for particular websites, the majority users who search the web will use the .com suffix in their initial search.
- Do not use your personal name as a domain name unless you are popular enough that people will search for you or your business that way.