The importance of domain names simply cannot be overstated:
Your website or blog’s domain name is essentially its identity, what it will
come to be known as and referred to by. It represents you, as an individual, or
your organization on the internet. And a good domain name also provides its
owner with a whole host of other benefits and advantages – especially from a
SEO-perspective – as you’ll soon find out.
It could very well be the difference between a successful blog
that gets a lot of traffic, and a blog that falls flat on its face!
Here are a few SEO best-practices to follow when thinking
of, or choosing a good domain name for yourself or your business:
1. Keywords: Keywords are the cornerstone of good SEO practices.
We spoke about how it is essential to integrate keywords in your headline/page
title before, and similarly, it is equally essential to add keywords in your
copy, and of course (wait for it…) in your domain name as well. It is
unrealistic and inadvisable to add multiple number of keywords in your domain
name, but your biggest keyword should always
go in your domain name. For instance Soccernet.com has the word ‘soccer’ in it,
and Techcrunch.com has the word tech – short for technology – in it. What this
does is that it allows search engine crawlers, as well as human visitors to
instantly know what your website is all about. From a crawler’s perspective, it
allows them to index your website easily and for the right keywords as well.
2. Top-level Domains: Or in short, TLDs refer to domains
that end in .com, .org, .net. info, .biz, .us or something similar. Always go
for a top-level domain for your website or blog, preferably a dotcom. Dotcoms
can be purchased for around $10-11 per year, and can be registered through the
many domain name registrars present out there, such as GoDaddy.com. Dotcom
domains are hard to find, since there are so many website on the internet that
most of them have already been registered. But don’t be afraid to get a little
creative if the domain you’re looking for has been taken!
3. Length: Domain names should ideally be short, as short as
possible. Shorter domain names provide a few distinct advantages: for starters,
they are easy to remember or recall, and secondly they are very easy for your
visitors to type into their browsers (showing that you respect their time).
4. Easy to type and memorable: a domain name based on one or
two well-known words or a small phrase, for instance, makes it much less prone
to being misspelled or getting typed incorrectly, as it will be much more
user-friendly. Conversely, a domain name prone to getting mistyped, or one that
is too complicated or difficult to remember will have you lose out on potential
visitors and sales, just because your domain name wasn’t easy-to-type. Having a
memorable domain name is also better from a word-of-mouth perspective as well
(think about Soccernet.com).
5. Hyphens: Putting hyphens in order to separate multiple
keywords can be done, but is inadvisable. Your domain name should never be so
long that there’s a need to break it down using hyphens. Moreover, hyphenated
domain names have little to no value in terms of SEO, mostly because a
keyword-keyword-keyword.com domain name looks spammy from a search engine
perspective, and too generic from a human perspective. Try thinking of
something creative instead.
6. Catchy and interesting: Not only should domain names be
short, memorable and easy, they need to be memorable and interesting. One
strategy that you could employ is use a combination of your brand name along
with a keyword (for eg. SouthwestSEO), or combine two random words (such as Face
and Book) to form one interesting and unique one (you probably know what I’m
talking about). Or you could sit down with your team, and come up with an
extremely creative, outside-the-box domain name for your new website/blog.
7. Grammatically-correct, no slang: Depending on your
website or blog’s niche, it might or might not be advisable to use slang. If
it’s a comedy/parody blog or if you think a play on words, for instance, will
amuse your target audience, only then you can do so. Otherwise, make sure that
the words are grammatically-correct.
8. Copyrights or legal issues: A domain name that is a play
on the words of another website could land in your hot water with the said
website (I’m talking legal problems and the like), as well as with Google. Examples:
Yohoo.com, Facebuk.com, etc. Avoid at all costs! Be original and think of
something on your own.
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