Domain Names and SEO/Marketing
What is a Domain Name? A Domain is the parent address of your site, I.E. www.domainname.co.uk.
There is a lot to say about domain names, both in terms of SEO and basic marketing. I start with the basic marketing side and will then move on to Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). The Name of your domain is probably the most important thing when setting up a website. This is your online identity and your online brand and you should take steps to protect this identity; from leakage by similar site names. For instance, if you saw Dragons Den a couple of weeks ago, there was a pitch for www.ifood.tv. From what I saw, all of the Dragons were interested, right up until they said that there was a competitor with the domain name www.ifoods.tv, the pitch went down hill from there. When looking at marketing like this, you should consider all users as being a goldfish and the fact is, the chance of the user going to www.ifoods.tv instead of www.ifood.tv has a high probability. This is called leakage and will only get bigger as your site gets bigger, and if the leaked website offers similar services, the user will probably stay there, and not continue on to find your site. Still on the subject of Dragons Den, they mentioned another point which was to build a brand/ URL around the persons name. This can be very effective if your name is well known within the industry that your are targeting.
Right, enough about general marketing this is an SEO blog after all and in terms of SEO, there are two primary things to look at. Firstly, the extension, E.g. .co.uk, .com .ie .us .net .org, this normally identifies to the search engine who your target audience is and therefore will appear in the search engine for that country. For instance, if you are targeting the UK, your domain should have a .co.uk extension, if you are targeting Ireland, it should be .Ie. If you were targeting, say a Russian market, by having a .co.uk extension you would not appear in google.rs but in google.co.uk. There are ways round this, but the best advice is to do it right the first time. There are extensions which are world wide, such as .com and .net which you can taylor to global and regional search engines. The best advice when buying a domain is to get your regional extension, E.g. .co.uk, plus the global extension, E.g. .com and .net. You should also consider buying extensions of the same name, where you may be considering expanding into in later years. This will give you protection against leakage as your buissness grows.
The Second thing, in terms of SEO is to get the domain name as close to your service or product as possible. For instance, if you sell shoes, you want “shoes” somewhere in the domain, for example, Rob_shoes.co.uk. This is because Search Engines place a lot of weight onto your domain name, and rightly so. There are other factors to domain names, such as Sub domains and how to use them, but they are bit advanced for this blog!
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