The Registration of domain names is a thriving business on
the Internet today – this is evident by the high bids
that companies are willing to pay in Per-Per-Click (PPC)
engines to attract potential customers for domain name registration.
The business of domain name registration is sometimes referred
to as “Internet Real Estate”. Just like we can
occupy high traffic areas in the central business districts
of major cities in the real world, we can register domains
for commonly used words or sought after keywords to generate
traffic more easily to our websites. While most common words
and abbreviations have already been taken for the most widely
used top level domain names, with a little bit of creativity
we can still register an endless number of promising domain
names.
While there is no clear indication to what extent .com,
.net as well as country top level domain names such as .co.uk,
.de, .fr and so forth influence search engine rankings of
websites, the word is that .org domains are still favored
by Google as part of the non-commercial tradition.
However, this article is not looking at how the domain extension
influences the ranking of a website as this is thought to
be insignificant for search engine rankings. A stronger influence
on search engine rankings have indeed the length of registration,
frequency of DNS changes as well as the reputation of the
registrar.
Even though sometimes overrated in its importance - especially
in relationship to its effect on search engine rankings,
domain names do remain an important asset for the online
corporate identity of your business.
The main consideration concerning your domain name will
be to choose between a creative name (such as "yahoo", "alibaba", "kazaa")
or a keyword name (such as "study-tourism", "retail-gifts" or "hawaii-mortgage-company".
In fact using main keywords in your domain name does have
a positive effect on your search engine rankings, especially
to get your rankings off the ground after launching a new
website. Down the road the effect however becomes almost
negligible.
While many people tend to register numerous domain names
to accommodate most important key words within them, they
overlook that Google and other major search engines will
pay almost the same attention to sub-domains. So instead
of registering "hawaii-real-estate", "florida-real-estate" and
so forth, we might as well just register "real-estate" and
have sub domains such as "hawaii.real-estate", "florida.real-estate" and
so forth.
What people further underestimate is that search engines
in general look for keywords in the URL (unique resource
locator) which comprises of the top level domain, any potential
sub-domains and of course the file name. So, if you happen
to be using a creative domain name that does not contain
any important key words, you can of course include your main
keywords in the file name of the webpage itself, i.e. florida-real-estate.html.
Hence, in a nutshell, while domain names are a major asset
for your corporate identity, their significance for search
engine rankings is overrated, as there are various ways to
accommodate significant keywords in the URL and eventually
other onsite factors (coding techniques, content) of a website
will have a greater impact for search engine rankings.
Svend Nelson is a university lecturer and Internet entrepreneur.
He is an online marketing specialist active in various online
industries; among his online presences in the real estate
and home loan industry are Hawaii
Real Estate Listings and Hawaii
Home Loans. Svend also just started a blog sharing his
experience about how to make
money online. Svend lived and worked in various countries
across Latin America, Europe and Asia before settling in
Thailand.
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