If you’re thinking of setting up a website from scratch – you’re in a good position. This is because you can take your time to think of a domain name that’ll not only reflect your brand and be easy to purchase via the likes of Midphase web hosting, but will also be good for SEO and improve organic growth. Choosing the right domain name is one of the most important decisions any business or individual can make when embarking in an online venture – but how can the domain name you opt for impact search results?
Keywords are user and SEO friendly
It’s hard to talk about SEO without mentioning keywords somewhere along the line. While giants of the search engine world, Google, look at many factors to decide which sites are most relevant and should appear on the search engine results page (SERP), relevancy is a major factor. A site needs to be relevant to the search in question and therefore if someone is looking for a holiday and you have the word ‘holiday’ in your URL – this is a good start.
That said, there’s far more you have to do to boost your SEO performance including writing great content. Major search engines such as Google are incredibly clever and since the Google Panda update of 2011 it’s no longer beneficial for companies simply to buy endless keyword rich domain names in a bid to hold their positions for various search terms on the SERPs page. Instead, continuous work is needed to develop an SEO strategy that’ll please search engines from all angles. This could include everything from content generation to link building and ensuring all meta descriptions and tags are well-optimised behind the scenes.
Short, sweet and relevant can have the best impact
Your domain name helps to reflect your brand. It’s what people will use to search for your services and products, so it is important to make it short, sweet and relevant. Using a punchy and commonly searched keyword will not only tell a specific search engine what you’re all about, but it will also tell the user what you are offering, helping to improve the relevancy of your page – which we already know is a good idea. If you are selling ladies shoes, for instance, including these details in your domain name is worthwhile.
Remember, however, that as well as choosing a domain for SEO purposes you should also appeal to the mass market by opting for something memorable and easy to remember as this in turn could lead to direct online searches which will potentially boost the popularity of your site and improve organic growth. It should also be easy to spell and preferably end in .com as this is what many people default to if they can’t remember the specific URL. Interestingly, the most expensive domains ever sold only contain one or two words max, so this is also something to remember.
Similarly, it’s perhaps not advisable to limit yourself with a geographically relevant domain unless you have absolutely no plans to expand in the future. By including a location in your URL you could rank very well for local searches, which may be good temporarily but become a bugbear if you look to expanding your services.
New suffixes = clever marketing
New domain suffixes are appearing left, right and centre, such as .car, .cars and .auto. Therefore, if your preferred name was already taken when you went to buy a domain, you can now be clever with your marketing, choosing a suffix that will help improve branding and which automatically contains a relevant keyword.
The domain name you opt for will certainly have some impact on SEO but don’t forget to give a lot of time and attention to other areas of your site as Google loves everything from original and fresh content to site with fast loading times.
