Saturday, September 20, 2008

Registering a keyword rich domain

Registering a keyword rich domain

Domain name registration is one of the most important things to consider when you are

designing a site for high search engine placement. Here are some dos and don’ts of

domain name registration.



Some Webmasters use shared domains or sub-domains available for free from popular

Web hosting services, or some kind of free domain name redirect service. This might be

cheap, but if you want a good search engine placement, it's not an option.



Some search engines do ban free Web hosts because search engine spammers

frequently use them for hosting duplicate sites (mirrors) and doorway pages.

Sharing domains or IP addresses with spammers can get your search engine

position penalized or your entire site banned. Note this statement from AltaVista:

"You could wind up being penalized or excluded simply because the underlying

IP address for that service is the same for all the virtual domains it includes."

Most search engines limit the number of submissions or number of listings for

each domain. This will make it very hard to get your site indexed. Other sites on

the same domain might already take all the available spots.

If you do manage to get your site indexed, the search engine will have a hard time

finding the “theme” for your site if you are sharing a domain with other sites on

many different subjects. Pages are no longer ranked one by one, all content within

the domain is considered.

Without your own domain, you will be forced to start working from scratch again

if the host goes out of business or if he decides to change your URL. Many

Webmasters have lost their search engine positions, link popularity and Web

traffic because of this.



Keywords in the domain name are crucial. It makes sense to put your primary keywords

into your domain name.



Separate multiple keywords like my-keywords-phrase.com instead of typing it all

in one word: mykeywordphrase.com. This will make it possible for the search

engines to understand your keyword phrases correctly.

Keep in mind that Yahoo and some other search engines reject domain

submissions with URL's in excess of 54 characters. You would be wise to stay

under the 55 character limit when choosing a domain name.

Directories like Yahoo, LookSmart and ODP will not look for keywords in the

text of your page, and editors will often edit keywords out of your title and

description. This leaves your internet domain name as the single most important

place to put keywords for your site.

Too many dashes in a domain name might trigger the spam filters of some search

engines.

Yet another benefit of keyword rich domain names is in reciprocal linking. If the

domain name keywords appear within the text of incoming links, you will get a

major boost in ranking, especially in Google.

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