Google has 88% of the global search engine market and we should do our best to keep them happy. The Google search engine is powered by a deeply complex algorithm, which is continually changing. There was change on the 28th September 2012, which left many Internet marketers up the creek without a paddle. Until that day is was a common belief that Google favoured exact match domains over other domains. The update was called Exact Match Domain (EMD) and as the name suggest it affect poor quality websites that used exact match domains to rank highly on Google.
Overnight many websites went from the top 10 in Google with thousands customers too not being found in the top 100, playscrabble.net is just one example of this. Any website outside the top 100 likely to have low search engine traffic as a large percentage of people do not look past the first two pages. It is common knowledge that Internet marketeers rely heavily on having exact keywords in their domain names, but EDM update only affects exact domain match sites that have little all or poor quality content. All this means to us is that our web sites need to contain a good standard of content and then we will not be affected by EDM.
I have some general rules when choosing a domain name, which are listed below:
The domain name should be short and simple – the shorter the domain name is the easier it is to type and remember. There is less chance that a consumer will end up on another website instead of yours.
If the domain name consists of more than one word check that is does not create any unintentional words for example, www.whoreprensts.com, which is meant to who represents .com, but it can also be interpreted as whore presents .com. This misinterpretation can be quite embarrassing for a site owner and makes the website seem unprofessional.
The website in question at the time writing was actually for a firm of lawyers, how ironic. Be careful spend time looking for unintentional words in a domain name before you purchase it.
Register the domain at correct level – as we discussed earlier if your website is going to be trading internationally then go for the .com, .org, or .net domain. If you are targeting the local search market then go for the extension in that region, for example, in Canada go for.ca.
Check you are not infringing another persons or companies trademark. You can do this using a service such as www.namecheck.com.
Try to avoid hyphens – the primary reason why you should avoid using hyphens in a domain name is due to word of mouth. When people tell their friends about www.london-dog-training.com it is unlikely that they are going to remember it contains hyphens. This means that the site is going to loose a lot of traffic to the domain without the hyphens i.e. www.londondogtraining.com.
Secondly, domains with hyphens look less professional or trustworthy, as hyphens in the domain name are very common in spam sites. If you have hyphens in your domain name try not to have more than 2, then you won’t look like a spam site. Please bare in mind that there is no evidence that Google associates multiple hyphens with a spam site, this is just a common user opinion.
Contrary, to what some SEO gurus claim, search engines will not penalise a website for having hyphen’s in the domain name and is perfectly fine to use hyphens for a page name, as it improves the readability. This leads me on to my point the only time you should use hyphens is to improve readability of the domain name.
Google is not going to know the domain name expertsexchange is about expert sex change or experts exchange until it is told. With a domain name like expertsexchange it better to use hyphens for the sake of readability and clarity, www.experts-exchange.com.
Try to avoid using numbers – the reason for this similar to the hyphens you could loose traffic when you domain missed typed due to word of mouth. This especially true when a number is used to replace a written word such, as “to” or “for”.
No comments:
Post a Comment