Search Marketing Blog
The Importance of Domain Names for Effective SEO
A well-defined domain name can provide tremendous advantages for an online business, including the added benefit of boosting performance in the search engines. Simple, easily-recognized domains convey professionalism and trust to search engine users. Just as important, however, is the fact that businesses can extend their reach in the search engines through a generic domain name, or through a domain that uses a country specific extension (see Country Code Top Level Domains below) to provide localized results to potential customer.
Country Code Top Level Domains (CCTLDs)
Google and other search engines have several Web sites for each country code, such as google.co.uk or google.co.in. These specific domains have been created for localized search, and in many cases they are the “dot-com” for search engine users in the respective countries. When searching through a country specific search engine domain, many times the results returned will include Web sites that are feature similar CCTLD domains, such as “domain.co.uk”. Astute search marketing firms that identify this situation can employ the effective strategy of using a CCTLD domain in order to achieve prominent positions within highly-targeted local search engines, and capture incremental qualified traffic.
Longer Is Sometimes Better For Conversions
Domain names are often thought to be less valuable if they include more than two or three words. However, this is not always the case in the search marketing world. Longer domain names tend to be significantly more specific than short domains. For example, “homeloan.com” may be succinct; however it is also very generic. Whereas the longer domain name “portlandmortgageloan.com” defines the type of loan and the geographical location.
Shorter domains may receive a greater quantity of traffic, but not necessarily greater converting traffic. Longer domains might receive fewer visitors per day, but the advantage is that the owner of the domain names knows that those visitors are looking for something very specific. You can then provide content and implement lead conversion strategies that take advantage of your increased understanding of the visitor’s needs.
Search Engine Rankings - Brand Trust
Companies can fortify their brand, and gain new business, by building trust through a generic domain name. As an example, Bank of America owns the domain “loans.com”. The company could chose to use this domain name separate from its primary domain to build-out a loan information site. This strategy could achieve prominent rankings in the search engines by leveraging this extremely generic domain name with their business model of providing several types of loans to consumers. This would be an effective strategy due to the fact that consumers tend to bestow a significant amount of trust a very generic domain such as “loans.com”.
Maxim 09.13.2007 at 7:21 am
Good review, Respect to you, author!
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Mark Fulton 09.13.2007 at 3:37 pm
Nice read, right up my ally. I may be mentioning this post in an upcoming article. Thanks!
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The Importance of Domain Names for SEO 10.07.2007 at 1:11 am
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Robert MPLSWIFI 10.08.2007 at 11:06 am
I’ve been saying this for years now. About time someone wrote about this. Short DNs are nice but as the net grows these more descriptive names become more effective. I don’t want a Apartment lease in Oklahoma i get from the generic i want iLeaseNYC.com an apartment in NYC. Nice..
Thanks
Secure dot .asia domain and register now » The Importance of Domain Names for SEO 10.16.2007 at 12:44 pm
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SEO for Yahoo Small Business - Terry Reeves 12.28.2007 at 10:12 am
Unfortunately, all of the good names are gone, unless you are very wealthy. However, I have many clients that have successfully branded a non-name and done very well in search.
Jumpions 01.16.2008 at 3:01 am
I noticed lately that Google ranks very well domains matching the exact query. Many sites are ranking better than sites with better SEO efforts for good keywords but also is true that having your brand name as a domain is a good thing to do in the long term.
I find it hard to choose between these 2 options