The SEO Gameplan - Your URL or Domain Name

The SEO game is all about getting your site as relevant as possible to your target keyword. Search engines need to know that the results they spring up in point-something seconds are the right results and they do this by indexing websites by keywords and showing them when searches for thatkeyword are made. Naturally these results are graded based on relevance and other factors. Here we are talking about on page SEO so we will focus heavily on relevance.

So how does your domain name or URL affect this?

Let me ask you a question. If you saw two domains; redshoes.com and thatweirdguysname.com which of these would be targetting the keyword "red shoes"? Sorry to be simplistic here but the point is that one would be more inclined to tink that redshoes.com will be talking about or selling red shoes. The other website may also talk about red shoes but it already feels less relevant. At best it's probably owned by a chancer trying to sell everything under the sun and not the expert at red shoes. Remember the thing about SEO trying to be as natural as possible? Well it helps to have your domain showing your keyword in it. It indicates upfront the relevance of your site to the search engines. They will still need to crawl it and index it under the right keywords but it helps. There is a lot of debate on what kind of domain do you get;.com.net.info and so on but that's a whole other conversation altogether today lets focus on the keywords in your domain.

Search engines look at the keyword position in your domain, the number of words in the domain and the length of the domain itself. Try to use a reasonable length for your domain and avoid trying to say everything about your business in your dot com. If you have to go beyond a one word domain it is better to use hyphens (-) than underscores (_) mainly for visibility reasons and also word of mouth marketing for your business which makes your domain easier to remember.

Always do remember that if you make it a point to include your keyword in your domain just make sure it reads naturally instead of making a desperate inclusion of it.

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