SEO Best Practices for Choosing a Domain Name for SEO?

SEO Best Practices for Choosing a Domain Name for SEO? Explore Some SEO Best Practices for Ensuring that Your Domain Name Is a Big Hit for SEO and User Experience

Domain names have been regarded as the vanguard of the online or digital experience for over two decades now. They help in providing real estate for organizations to establish their online presence, as well as, effective doorways for their prospective customers to locate them. In this context, choosing domain names for SEO have a huge impact in terms of CTR from social media to search results, including type-in traffic, to referring links, offline advertising, and brand-ability. There exists a massive treasure house of places that your specific domain name could be impacting your brand and overall online marketing.

You simply can’t ignore the importance of the domain name for SEO and your brand.

As per https://www.entrepreneur.com, the Internet is a crowded place. Statistics from WhoIsHostingThis.com, a web hosting tool, tell us that 84,000 brand new domain names seem to be registered every single day.

That implies that for startups and small business owners it is becoming more and more difficult to come up with a domain name that’s just right for your customers to remember. Besides being memorable, your domain name must safeguard your brand and trademark. For maximizing search engine-referred traffic, you must follow some SEO best practices when choosing your domain name as discussed below.

1. Focus on Making Your Domain Name Outstanding & Memorable

You must try your best to identify domain names that seem to be short, easy to type, easy to pronounce and easy to remember. This is of great significance for word-of-mouth promotion and advertising as those visitors would be required to come to your precise domain directly. Moreover, a memorable domain name is also, essential for processing fluency. You need to avoid such domain names that include numbers, figures or any other non-standard characters, are longer and use unusual spelling. Since search engines are increasingly relying on usability and accessibility as an important ranking factor, the easier and simpler a URL or domain for humans to read, the better it becomes for search engines.

2. Consider Making the Domain Name Brandable

Brandable implies that the moment you see or hear the domain name, it appears to you as a brand or sounds very much like a brand. You must keep in mind that numbers and hyphens need to be avoided as they pose a major problem. They definitely do not sound at all like a brand. They sound strange or generic.

3. Make Your Domain Name Short

Length is of great importance in terms of processing fluency. It is definitely easier to say, type, or share if the domain name contains fewer characters. If your domain name is short, it is less likely to be shortened on search results and social media sharing channels. Always remember shorter domain names are certainly better.

4. Make Your Domain Name Intuitive

A perfect domain name would be giving users a solid idea of what exactly a website would really be about. When you can understand at once what a business is all about while glancing through the domain name, you have come up with a highly intuitive one. People should be able to guess what your company does by looking at your domain name. For instance, PastaBest.com is quite obvious hence; the domain name is pretty intuitive as anybody could easily figure out what the company is all about.

5. Think about Using Broad Keywords

Keywords incorporated into a domain name could prove to be helpful in terms of cognitive fluency biases, as well as, from the perspective of search engine optimization. Google generally biases away from all these partial match domains and exact match domains, however, the anchor text obtained by you from users linking to specifically your domain could prove to be helpful.

If you could incorporate a broad keyword into your domain name that makes it pretty obvious as to what your organization is all about while retaining a domain name that is unique, catchy, and even brand-friendly, you must opt for it. However, it is a wise decision to stay away from those domain names that are regarded as keyword-targeted or keyword-rich.

In recent years, we have noticed that Google has come up with numerous algorithm updates and changes that do not give priority to sites that have keyword-rich domains but are actually of poor quality. Including a keyword in the domain name could prove to be beneficial, however, it could culminate in meticulous scrutiny and you may get a negative impact on your SERP rankings. You need to tread with caution. It is a good idea to coordinate with a partner like AtomicDesign.net that is known for understanding all about domain name negotiations and could help you in saving your financial resources and valuable time.

6. Avoid Hyphens Wherever Possible

Suppose your domain name comprises two words such as www.sitename.com, you would like to separate these two words by using a hyphen to boost readability like www.site-name.com. However, you must not forget that using hyphens are often correlated strongly with spammy behavior and diminishes domain name memorability and readability. As such, you must avoid using more than just a single hyphen. However, it is best to avoid hyphens wherever possible.

7. Move Domains Whenever Necessary

Whenever a webmaster deems it necessary to move a domain to another one, there are numerous crucial factors to keep in mind including building the redirects page wise in a way that deep content pages and sub-folders are seamlessly redirected to all the relevant or corresponding deep content pages and sub-folders on your new domain. SEOs must not redirect all pages from a particular domain to another domain’s homepage.

8. You Are Free To Append or Modify Your Domain Name

Suppose the domain name you are looking for is just not available, you could consider adding a prefix or a suffix. You could even consider using alternate TLD extensions. It is fine to be slightly creative and unique with your specific online brand.

Conclusion

Keep all the above-discussed SEO rules or best practices for creating your domain name in mind. Follow them so that you could come up with a short, crisp, brandable, intuitive, and memorable domain name for your business or organization.

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by Chris London of Pixel Productions Inc. The Everything Design Company