What's In a Name?
When you begin building your business online, one of the first decisions you'll need to make is what to name your website. In most cases, this is the same thing as your domain name, though in some cases you may choose a different title for your website than your domain name.
But – just in case you're not familiar with web addresses and domain names, here's a little bit of geeky style information to give you some background. A web address is made up of a few different building blocks that all together form the address of your website. A "root domain" is easy to identify – it's your domain name and the extension (the .com, .net, .biz, etc., at the end). A subdomain is considered a "lower-level component" of a domain name, and it precedes the domain name (http://subdomain.domain.com).
The URL for your website is its address, the part that starts out with http://www… It usually has a word or words related to your business in the middle of it. This is an important thing to choose carefully, both in terms of your branding and in terms of the benefit you get for your SEO. Tips for your website's domain that give you the maximum benefit in terms of search include judiciously including a keyword or two in your title in a way that sounds natural.
SEO Tips for Choosing a Great Domain Name
1.Make it memorable
While being found by a search engine is great, being remembered by your customers and prospects is important too. Keeping your domain name nice and short makes it easier to benefit from simple technologies such as word-of-mouth advertising and referrals from your customers – some of the best marketing out there!
2. Use keywords wisely
There's an art to choosing a domain name with keywords in it. The presence of a keyword in a domain is a key ranking factor for a website. However, you want to make it friendly, catchy, and memorable, and not obviously keyword stuffed. Not only will it turn off your human visitors, but Google will most likely catch on and penalize you for doing so.
Also – having keywords in your domain name helps because it is the anchor text that other users will use when linking to your content. The presence of your keywords in your anchor text gives a boost to your ranking, so having these words in your domain name as a link will give special positive impact to your ranking.
3. Choose Relatively Short Domain Names
If you have a domain name that is multiple words, you may want to consider separating the words with hyphens. However, multiple hyphens in a domain name also appears spammy to Google, so keep it fairly short.
Hopefully this has simplified some of the SEO tips for new websites when it comes to picking a great domain name. There are some good things to consider – and there are still some myths out there too!
What are some of the things you've heard about picking a domain name for your website? Any questions you have about it? Leave a comment below – we love to hear from you!