How to choose your website URL address June 10, 2007
Category : Traffic Building , 6 commentsYour website address, www.websitename.com is extremely important for SEO, for marketing to humans, and for building your online brand.
There are many things to consider when choosing a name, and much of this is a matter of personal preference, so here are some things to consider when choosing your website address.
Try and make the name it as short as possible, the shorter the better.
Important: Your domain name should have at least one of your chosen search keywords in it, this is very important for SEO, because the search engines takes the view that the URL name of the website is one of the most important indicators of content and therefore relevance.
For example if someone searched for DVDs and the index has 2 websites with similar DVD content volume and quality, if one website was called digitalstore.com and the other is called dvd.com, well the dvd.com will place higher when searching for the word DVD.
For SEO only names, it is acceptable to have longer names, as long as your chosen search keywords are in the longer domain name. Obviously this is not so good if marketing to people, people don’t like typing long names, and don’t remember them, so this is something you will have to decide for yourself
Check the competition when choosing your domain name, don’t pick a name that’s too similar to a competitor for example don’t buy dvd-store.org if dvd-store.com is taken, they will always be older then your website and as a result higher ranked, also you will be driving traffic to their site through natural search and people have a preference for typing .com not .org
Are dotcom domains better then dotnet or dotorg? or any of the others?, the answer is .com is better for branding and marketing to humans, but the search engines don’t give any preference to a website with different extensions.The main reason you will see dot com website place higher then equivalent dot org etc websites is because the dot com website are typically much older, and have been building their rank and hence relevance for much longer then the newer domains. For example .mobi was only created in 2006.
Mobile device considerations, if your thinking of offering your website to mobile users, then your choice of domain name is important, absolutely the shorter the domain name the better, also it recommended to use a top level domain name.
There is a big problem with all of this and it is simply that all the good names you might have short listed will most likely been chosen already.
This will force you to choose ever longer and more exotic domain names, for example, dvdstore.com is taken so you might have to try something like dvd-store or Ilovedvdstore.com, if don’t correctly this fine for SEO but not as desirable for marketing to human beings
Tip: Even if a desired domain name is take, open it in a browser and do a whois to see if it is it actually in use, you will be surprised at how many domains are cyber squatted and not actually in use. In this case you can use the alternative .org or whatever domain name without losing traffic to the dot com.
Tags: Domain name, URL, Howto
