Domains and search engine optimization

Posted in: webmaster in womentoday's Blog

Whenever you buy a new domain, it will be to your advantage to think about search engine optimization at the beginning.

If it is to make your domain name more valuable for a buyer with regular traffic to its pages, or for the sake of your profits (for which you also need steady, and hopefully growing levels of traffic), search engine optimization is needed unless you are simply going to promote by PPC.

Firstly, the myths. It is now taken for granted among the top SEO commentators that key words in the domain itself have no effect on the results rankings of site pages. The days are over where search engine algorithms could be misled by simple tricks like creating a domain called buy-keyword1–keyword2.com. Your internal page names, if they include keywords, may have some effect, though this too is doubtful.

So, when deciding on a domain, you shouldn't worry when you find all the top domains are already registered. The search results will show the domain name to those searching, but that is the only possible advantage of keywords in a domain name.

Myth number two is that using pay-per-click on your new domain will get it picked up, cause spidering, and give it a boost in the search engine rankings. This has been shown to be just not the case, and is the result of simple-minded hopeful thinking.

Get natural links from other sites, and the spiders will arrive naturally.

Include useful content, and the search engines will learn to love you. If you can't create original content, look for a writer who can. The old ways of collecting web content – scraping, lifting pages from directories, and all the gray and black hat methods either don't work or will just set your site up for 1000th place in the listings.

Don't worry about keyword density, just create your pages on a natural, single subject. In fact, do not think about the search engines at all. Your intention should be to give something worthwhile to your real audience – your actual visitors.

Validating your new site to W3C standard is a total waste of your time. Google would have to exclude 99% of the internet from its results if it used this as a ranking technique. Use the time saved to create new pages.

Don't pay to place your new domain in paid directories, or directories selling pagerank-based links. This may have worked once, but the search engine algorithms no longer pay attention to tricks like this. Just consider – a rich company could buy its way to the top of the results for every keyword it wanted, if paying for links actually worked: and it would destroy the worth of the search engines to their users. This is precisely Google and the other engines want to avoid at all costs.

However, the search engine giants can make mistakes. Some sites, however great and original their content and however prolific their incoming links, just never do anything in the search results. Buy another domain and try again.

Keep reading – see my site for more about how to register a domain name.