Domain name matters

Does your domain name matter?

Years ago Google would index search keywords in your domain name. These days your choice of domain name has little effect on your ranking in the search results unless the name contains an obscene word or was used by a black hat (bad) SEO before you and has been black-listed.

The most important factors when choosing a domain name are:

* It must be easy to remember
* It doesn't have to be short. HuffingtonPost is the most popular blog in the world.
* It should have words that are related to what it does. e.g. RescueTime.com sells time management software. MediaPiston.com is a copywriting service.
* It must be easy to spell
* It must be easy to pronounce
* It should not contain dashes - when someone remembers your domain, they won't remember if it included dashes or not.
* It should be a dot-com. .org'ers argue with me if you like, but dot-com's are still the most memorable domains.

I would also avoid domains that incorporate a top level domain into the spelling. For example: "del.icio.us". It worked as a marketing gimmick for Delicious back when they launched, but even they chose to buy delicious.com and replace their original fancy spelling with a plain vanilla dot-com domain.

What about URL structure?

Your URL's should contain words that describe each page on your site separated by dashes. This is not a good URL:

http://example.com/?p=2343

This is a good URL:

http://example.com/how-to-bake-a-cake.html

Search engines index the words in your URL and give them slightly greater emphasis than the text that appears in your page content. You must use dashes instead of underscores. Google treats words separated by underscores as one big word. Here is Google's Matt Cutts explaining why you should use dashes in your URL's. Notice the URL of the page I linked to. It's well formed with dashes separating the words. Matt uses a forward slash at the end of his blog entry URL's. You can also use a .html extension - either works just as well.

Cross linking is key

Every page of content on your site should cross link to other content. If you have a blog, throw in a link to older blog posts you've written at every opportunity. Don't go too wild - just 1 to 3 links are fine. I tend to get peeved at sites that cross link too much, so only link to content that is actually relevant to what you're writing about. As the amount of content on your site grows, you'll have more fuel to cross-link to.

Cross-linking is important because not only does it help search engines find your content, but it helps them figure out which content is the most important. Google does this by calculating internal page rank for each page on your site. It figures out which pages you're linking to most often and emphasizes those pages in the results. The result is that important pages like your home page are ranked higher than content deeper in your site.

That's all for todays edition. Have a great weekend and I'll see you again next week when we'll dive into my favorite part of SEO: Link development, link bait and letting the right people know about your site.

Regards,

Mark Maunder
Feedjit Founder & CEO
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What is a domain name?