Search Engine Optimisation - Tuesday, August 26, 2008 10:12 - 1 Comment

SEO Friendly Domain Names

Often when businesses are registering their domain names, they think very little about what they choose. The obvious choice is that the name of your business will also be the domain name of your website. While it does make perfect sense to register your business name as a domain, before someone else does, it is often just as important to register domains as similar as possible to the phrases you would like to be found on Google for.

Let’s say you make fridge magnets for a living and your business is called ‘Positive Charge”. Along with registering the domain name,positivecharge.com.au you should also be registering fridgemagnets.com.au. If it is available that is. The next best domain would be fridge-magnets.

But what do you do with the business name domain or in this case positivefridgemagnet.com.auThere are a few options. You could just make it redirect to fridgemagnets, so people who type your business name directly still come to your sales site. Or you could make a small site with information about your products with links to the sales site. You could make it also a sales site. However what you do not want to do is make the two sites identical. The content that will be duplicated just makes it difficult from an seo point of view to get either of them ranking well.

This also makes sense. The aim of Google is to provide fresh content from a variety of sources. Why would it want to rank the same thing twice, how will that benefit the user. Google also tries to rank the original or authoritative source of duplicat content higher than the repeats. If it can not distinguish which is which, this can cause confusion for both Google and the person trying to rank your site.

This is pretty common knowledge that I am sharing. It is very likely that the sort of domains I am mentioning when applied to your business are already taken. Consider adding your business name and the keyphrase you want to be found for together. Something like pcfridgemagnets or positivefridgemagnets could apply to the case above.

If there are a variety of niche products or services you offer that lots of people search for, consider creating more than one website and target each one on your specific product or service. This will give you more chances to rank for more of your target phrases. The user generally doesn’t care about branding and things like that as long as you are offering what they want clearly, professionally and it is easy to buy or call or whatever. SEO friendly domain names can be very important to boost your business.

Let me know if you agree or disagree with these points.