| Website SEO When Choosing your domain name | | Print | |
Choosing your domain name Once you have the right hosting environment, it is time to consider your domain name. Since the very earliest days of the mass-market internet, people have spent anything from a dollar to $14 million (on sex.com) to acquire keyword-rich domain names. It’s time to dust off that list of keywords.
Remember the keyworddeployment principles of prominence, proximity, and density? Well, here’s a newsflash: One of the most effective places to deploy your keywords is in the first full text block that Google sees, the full URL of each and every page on your site. The full URL comprises the domain name, the directory structure, and the filename.
Forexample: http://www.yourdomain.com/product-categoryA/product1.html
As prominence remains the most important of the three deployment principles, it is the domain name itself that you must consider first, as it appears closest to the front of this text block. We will cover the directory structure and filename in a later section (page 86).
Did you notice all the hyphens in the list of suggestions? Is it better to have underscores, hyphens, or nothing between the words in your domain name? You absolutely should not use underscores. Matt Cutts has confirmed on his blog that Google does not recognize underscores as equivalent to spaces between words. My personal preference is for hyphens, for the following reasons:
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While Google can distinguish and separate words without spaces from each other pretty well, some other search engines are not so clever.
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Hyphens separate out the words more clearly and are thus easier on the eye for the human reader.
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By using hyphens in your domain name, you can readily repeat these in your directory structure and file names later (creating a simple but effective consistency throughout your site).
Brad makes a visit to a keyword-rich domain tool and finds to his surprise that many frequently searched options that are relevant to his business are still available, including:
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printing-service.biz (62,297 daily searches)
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online-business-printing.com (115 daily searches)
Brad snaps them up, in preference to the four-word combinations online-business-card-printing.com and business-card-printingservice. com (which are also available). However, following emotional discussions with his family, he decides not to use either of these for the main business site (currently chambersprint.com), but instead sets the domains aside for future use as complementary business blog sites.
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