The importance of domain and page naming is obvious, but you might not have realized the connection to SEO. We all know that unless our domain name is highly recognizable and memorable then we wont get many customers, but good domain names also matter when it comes to search engine rankings the more relevant your domain is to your keywords, the higher it will be ranked. Domain names are not that difficult to come by at this point. Godaddy.com puts out some great prices and they run all sorts of specials once you become a customer. The more domains that you buy the more that they like you. The basic concept here is that people who buy a few domain names are probably going to become pretty big on the internet. The more that you own the more powerful you are. Domain names are like land in the early eighteenth century. They are valuable and the owners become a sort of elite class on the internet. The value of domains is difficult to determine until you have purchased one and worked with it for a while. The difference between owning your own domain name and hosting your site on a sub domain or in a subdirectory of a domain is huge. The impact on your ability to perform SEO operations increases drastically simply by the ease of clarifying your URL for the search engines and directories that you submit to. There are even directories out there that do not except anything except for domains. These are the kind of elitist sites that I described earlier. Domain names are the only way to go if you want to have a seriously successful website that becomes a household name. Directories that do not allow non-domain names are there to protect an investment. If you have spent money on purchasing and hosting a domain name you probably arent to excited about seeing sites that havent dropped a dime on investment being rated above you. This is a sort of aristecratic mind set, but it is a natural tendency of the mind. There are plenty of directories out there that everybody is able to access, but there are some out there that are only for the elite sites of the internet. This elitist attitude towards domain names is beneficial to your sites because it allows you to get an edge on other sites simply by buying a domain name. This investment is the most crucial SEO investment that you can make. There are very few sites around that get huge numbers of hits (10,000+ per month) without having their own domain name. So what do you need to do to get these good rankings? Start off by choosing a domain that matches your website well, and youre killing two birds with one stone. Your domain name and URL should reflect what youre trying to accomplish from your site. For example: calling your website thewebcorporation.com isnt much good if it sells hot sauce. For hot sauce, deserthotsauce.com would be a better name the deserts hot, like the sauce! Dont settle for anything that wont make people want to come to your site. Using the name of your company for your domain name is also a good way to go. This is the fastest way of providing a good, quality description of what the visitor is going to. Many visitors will actually consider your domain name the name of your company anyway so you might as well name yourself something that you want to be called. Most webmasters settle for safe, can't-go-wrong www.myname.com domains, because it takes time to be creative and think up good names that contain your keywords. You might consider getting some help from the people around you, as you never know what they might be thinking that could be great. You need to come up with a few ideas in case some are taken youll be surprised just how many domains have gone. Everyone always wants a .com, but you shouldnt rule out .net, .org, .us and the rest. For example, if deserthotsauce.com is taken, you might find that people like deserthotsauce.us just as much. |
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