Domain
Name Registration and Search Engine Rankings
Domain Name Registration and Search Engine Rankings
The Registration of domain names is a thriving business on the Internet
today – this is evident by the high bids that companies are
willing to pay in Per-Per-Click (PPC) engines to attract potential
customers for domain name registration.
The business of domain name registration is sometimes referred
to as “Internet Real Estate”. Just like we can occupy
high traffic areas in the central business districts of major cities
in the real world, we can register domains for commonly used words
or sought after keywords to generate traffic more easily to our
websites.
While most common words and abbreviations have already been taken
for the most widely used top level domain names, with a little bit
of creativity we can still register an endless number of promising
domain names.
While there is no clear indication to what extent .com, .net as
well as country top level domain names such as .co.uk, .de, .fr
and so forth influence search engine rankings of websites, the word
is that .org domains are still favored by Google as part of the
non-commercial tradition.
However, this article is not looking at how the domain extension
influences the ranking of a website as this is thought to be insignificant
for search engine rankings. A stronger influence on search engine
rankings have indeed the length of registration, frequency of DNS
changes as well as the reputation of the registrar.
Even though sometimes overrated in its importance - especially
in relationship to its effect on search engine rankings, domain
names do remain an important asset for the online corporate identity
of your business.
The main consideration concerning your domain name will be to choose
between a creative name (such as "yahoo", "alibaba",
"kazaa") or a keyword name (such as "study-tourism",
"retail-gifts" or "hawaii-mortgage-company".
In fact using main keywords in your domain name does have a positive
effect on your search engine rankings, especially to get your rankings
off the ground after launching a new website. Down the road the
effect however becomes almost negligible.
While many people tend to register numerous domain names to accommodate
most important key words within them, they overlook that Google
and other major search engines will pay almost the same attention
to sub-domains.
So instead of registering "hawaii-real-estate", "florida-real-estate"
and so forth, we might as well just register "real-estate"
and have sub domains such as "hawaii.real-estate", "florida.real-estate"
and so forth.
What people further underestimate is that search engines in general
look for keywords in the URL (unique resource locator) which comprises
of the top level domain, any potential sub-domains and of course
the file name.
So, if you happen to be using a creative domain name that does
not contain any important key words, you can of course include your
main keywords in the file name of the webpage itself, i.e. florida-real-estate.html.
Hence, in a nutshell, while domain names are a major asset for
your corporate identity, their significance for search engine rankings
is overrated, as there are various ways to accommodate significant
keywords in the URL and eventually other onsite factors (coding
techniques, content) of a website will have a greater impact for
search engine rankings.
About the Author Svend Nelson is a university
lecturer and Internet entrepreneur. He is an online marketing specialist
active in various online industries; among his online presences
in the real estate and home loan industry are Hawaii
Real Estate Listings and Hawaii Home Loans. Svend also just
started a blog sharing his experience about how to make money online.
|