How Domain Names & Hosting Affect Your Rank!

11
Sep

by Justin McGill1 Comment »

It has been a little bit since we’ve gone into some SEO related postings, so I’m going to be delving into the topic with this blog posting. We’re going to discuss the importance of utilizing long term hosting plans and choosing appropriate domain names and how these things can affect your search engine results!

Choosing the Right Domain Name
This one is an important factor. It isn’t easy establishing a brand name, and it usually takes years to do so. Therefore, it is suggested that you choose a domain name that contains targeted keywords. For example, lets say your business name is “Zoomie,” and you sold mountain bikes. www.zoomie.com is going to take years for you to develop a brand and identity. If you wanted to put together a website for your Mountain Bike selling business, it might be best to utilize a URL such as www.mountainbikesforsale.com.

Avoid Dashes and Numbers
Numbers and dashes add no real significant value to your domain, and should be avoided in most cases. Dashes seem to be accepted, but through enough research it seems to take a slight hit in regards to SEO. Search engines find them spammy, and therefore a domain without dashes will get a slightly better ranking than the same exact name with dashes. For example, www.mountainbikesforsale.com will do better than www.mountainbikes4sale.com and www.mountain-bikes-for-sale.com. Numbers and dashes in the domain also hurt the resale value of your domain if you have plans to sell the domain down the road.

Register for the Long Term
When choosing a hosting plan and registering your domain, use the longest term that you can afford. Preferably, a three or four year term. The reason for this is so that search engines will know your domain will be around for a long time. This helps to differentiate your domain from spamming type of domains who may only be registered for one year. If you are purchasing a domain from a domain marketplace, try and find one that has been around for awhile. The longer the better, as search engines put more weight into domains that have been in existence for a longer period of time. Try and use the WHOIS tool as well as the Wayback Machine.These tools allow you to check if the domain’s have been registered before.

Purchase Similar Domain Names
If you purchase www.mountainbikesforsale.com, try and purchase www.mountainbikesforsale.net and .org as well. You will want those domains to point to your main website (.com in this case). This tells search engines that you are trying to consolidate your brand. If you have a website that might sound like other words, it may be a good idea to purchase those domain names as well.

So, as you can see, you need to keep SEO in mind from the very beginning! Utilizing these techniques, in conjunction with other SEO topics that have been discussed, will help to build your business .

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Justin McGill is a web marketing professional and runs a successful Small Business SEO Firm. He is the founder and CEO of SEORCHERS (read: [surch-ers]) - a local web marketing firm specializing in organic search engine optimization (SEO) with a focus on converting visitors into clients. He is available for SEO Consulting and now you can connect with him on Google+!.

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