Domains For Search Engines
Summary
Search engines are powerful avenues for capturing traffic to your website. For
many web-based businesses, search engines represent the most important channel
for generating new visitors to their sites. Attaining a solid position in search
engines is a very complex task that requires both up front planning and on-going
analysis and change. Choosing your domain name can have an impact on your
placement in search engines, so choose your domain name with search engine
optimization in mind. This article provides some high-level tips for picking a
domain name that will give you an edge in search engine placement. This article
focuses on alignment of your domain name with good search engine results and not
choosing a domain name from a marketing and branding perspective. It is important
to balance the needs of both before you commit to a domain name.
Key Phrases are Key
Search engine results are driven by what visitors to a search engine type in as
their search phrase. Before you complete the design of your website and choose
the domain name, analyze which key words and phrases you want to focus on. The
more targeted your key phrases, the more targeted your traffic will be. A good
resource to consider which key phrases may work for your site is Overture's
search term suggestion tool. Overture tracks search terms and related search
terms. The search term suggestion tool can be found here. For example, if you type in the word "travel", you
will receive the number of times people searched on the word "travel" in the
prior month and a list of 50 related search terms sorted by the number of times
the word was searched on. For example, a search on "travel" will also return
phrases such as "travel to Mexico", "international travel", and "AAA travel".
Once you choose which key phrases best represent what your site has to offer and
what target audience are hoping to receive traffic from, you can design your
site and choose a domain name that will best help position your site in search
engines in the future. Using the travel example, if your website provides travel
services to Mexico, you may choose "travel to Mexico" as your primary key phrase.
Search Engines vs. Directories
An important point to remember is that search engines and directories are two
separate animals. Search engines use automated programs called "bots" to scan or
"spider" your site for search terms and then establish a position for specific
search phrases. Different search engines use different searching algorithms
based on word density, location, and other page-related factors. If you create
a website, the major search engines will eventually crawl your site and position
it in their search results. An example of a search engine is Google. Directories,
on the other hand, are organized lists of links to web sites. If you create a
website, you will not automatically be listed in a directory. In order to be
listed, you must submit your site to an editor, who then determines whether your
site belongs in the directory all together and if so, which categories your
website will be belong to. Your domain name has different influences on search
engines and directory placement.
Directories
Getting your site into directories such as Yahoo or the Open Directory Project
(ODP) requires a submission to an editor who will decide if your site is worth
retaining in the directory. Many factors contribute to the success of getting
into a directory. The content richness of your site is probably the most
important criteria when a directory editor reviews your site while the domain
name itself has relatively little impact on the editor's analysis. However,
one key domain name consideration is the alignment of your domain name to your
site's title and the rest of the content in the site. An editor will likely
reject your site if your domain name is misleading to the casual surfer. For
example, let's assume you intent to launch a website which offer travel services
to Mexico. If the title of your site is "Travel to Mexico in Style" and your
domain name is "johnsmith.com" a directory editor may not choose to list your
site. Or if they do, they list your site as "johnsmith.com" which will not
help identify what your site offers.
Directories usually list sites in alphabetical order. So choosing a domain name
that starts with the letter "A" will give you better placement. Also, placing a
character such as and exclamation point "!" at the beginning will be listed
before the "A"'s. However, if you use an exclamation point in the beginning of
your name, it will look fairly strange to surfers. Using a letter at the
beginning of the alphabet as the first letter in the name is the best approach
to getting a solid position in directories.
Search Engines
Unlike directories, search engines use automated programs to analyze your web
site to determine its placement in search results. Every search engine uses a
different method for site analysis, and in general, the domain name itself has
a relatively small impact to search engine placement, but one of the most
important domain name considerations is the placement of keywords in the domain
name itself and the similarity of the domain name and page title. For example,
if your site sells travel services to Mexico, you may want to choose a domain
name such as "Travel-To-Mexico.com". Note that there are hyphens between each
keyword. Hyphens are powerful additions to your domain name in that they are
both easy to recognize, remember, and search engines are able to distinguish
the key words within the domain name. If instead you chose the domain name
"Traveltomexico.com", the search engines would not be able to pick out the
words "travel", "to", and "mexico". It would simply see the domain as a single
jumble of words. However, keep in mind that using many keywords separated by
hyphens may make the name of your site difficult for people to recall.
With the advent of long domain names, you could choose a domain name such as
"www.Cheap-Discount-International-Travel-To-Mexico.com". Plenty of keywords in
this domain but see if your customers will ever remember it and be able to pass
on your site as a recommendation to someone else (remember- word of mouth is a
critical traffic channel for you website).
Most search engines also use link popularity as a factor in determining a site's
ranking in search results. Link popularity is usually determined by both the
quantity and quality of links from other people's sites to your sites. Achieving
a quantity of links is a matter of getting more and more people to place links
on their website pointing to your website. Quality is partly determined by the
text in the link itself (called anchor text). Usually, the anchor text will be
the same as your domain name which should contain your ever important key phrases.
So the more links you receive to your site containing "Travel-To-Mexico" in the
anchor text, the higher your ranking could be for words like "travel" and
"Mexico" on some search engines.
Avoid Freebies
Be careful not to register a site with a free hosting service. For example,
instead of choosing "www.Travel-To-Mexico.com", you end up with
"www.freewebhosting.com/travel-to-mexico". Some search engines will not even
spider websites that are hosted by free hosting services and your site would not
show up at all. Additionally, when a search engine determines the placement of a
website in its search results, it almost always places emphasis on the home page
of the domain. Therefore, if you are hosting through someone else's domain name,
the importance of your site to search engines will be watered down since it's
the home page of your free hosting company that will receive more attention.
Afterwords
Achieving good results in search engines and directories is extremely
challenging. Every search engine has a different method for determining rankings
in search results and their methods change on a regular basis! Before you even
design and launch your site, give yourself an edge by choosing a domain name
that will work well in search engines and directories. This article has
attempted to provide you some domain name tips to help you with search engine
optimization. But remember to balance the needs of being well placed in search
engines and directories with the importance of having a site that is memorable
and aligns with your marketing, branding, and advertising plans.
|
