The Art of SEO : Optimization of Domain Names/URLs

1. Optimizing Domains

When a new site is being conceived or designed one of the critical items to consider is the naming of the domain, whether it is for a new blog, a company launch, or even just a friend’s website. Here are 12 tips that will be indispensable when helping you select a great domain name:

Brainstorm five top keywords

When you begin your domain name search, it helps to have five terms or phrases in mind that best describe the domain you’re seeking. Once you have this list, you can start to pair them or add prefixes and suffixes to create good domain ideas. For example, if you’re launching a mortgage-related domain, you might start with words such as mortgage, finance, home equity, interest rate, and house payment, and then play around until you can find a good match.

Make the domain unique

Having your website confused with a popular site that someone else already owns is a recipe for disaster. Thus, never choose a domain that is simply the plural, hyphenated, or misspelled version of an already established domain. For example, Flickr desperately needs to buy Flicker.com—when kids in their 20s tell parents in their 40s and 50s to see photos on Flickr you can easily imagine that traffic going straight to the wrong domain.

Choose only dot-com available domains

If you’re not concerned with type-in traffic, branding, or name recognition, you don’t need to worry about this one. However, if you’re at all serious about building a successful website over the long term, you should be worried about all of these elements, and although directing traffic to a .net or .org is fine, owning and 301'ing the .com is critical. With the exception of the very tech-savvy, most people who use the Web still make the automatic assumption that .com is all that’s out there, or that these domains are more trustworthy. Don’t make the mistake of locking out or losing traffic from these folks.

Make it easy to type

If a domain name requires considerable attention to type correctly due to spelling, length, or the use of unmemorable words or sounds, you’ve lost a good portion of your branding and marketing value. Usability folks even tout the value of having the words include easy-to-type letters (which we interpret as avoiding q, z, x, c, and p).

Make it easy to remember

Remember that word-of-mouth marketing relies on the ease with which the domain can be called to mind. You don’t want to be the company with the terrific website that no one can ever remember to tell their friends about because they can’t remember the domain name.

Keep the name as short as possible

Short names are easy to type and easy to remember (see the previous two rules). They also allow for more characters in the URL in the SERPs and a better fit on business cards and other offline media. Shorter URLs also get better click-through in the SERPs, according to a MarketingSherpa study located at http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?ident=30181.

Create and fulfill expectations

When someone hears about your domain name for the first time, he should be able to instantly and accurately guess at the type of content he might find there. That’s why we love domain names such as Hotmail.com, CareerBuilder.com, AutoTrader.com, and WebMD.com. Domains such as Monster.com, Amazon.com, and Zillow.com required far more branding because of their nonintuitive names.

Avoid trademark infringement

This is a mistake that isn’t made too often, but it can kill a great domain and a great company when it does. To be sure you’re not infringing on anyone’s registered trademark with your site’s name, visit the U.S. Patent and Trademark office site and search before you buy.

Set yourself apart with a brand

Using a unique moniker is a great way to build additional value with your domain name. A “brand” is more than just a combination of words, which is why names such as Mortgageforyourhome.com and Shoesandboots.com aren’t as compelling as branded names such as Bankrate.com and Lendingtree.com.

Reject hyphens and numbers

Both hyphens and numbers make it hard to convey your domain name verbally and fall down on being easy to remember or type. Avoid spelled-out or Roman numerals in domains, as both can be confusing and mistaken for the other.

Don’t follow the latest trends

Website names that rely on odd misspellings (as do many Web 2.0-style sites), multiple hyphens (such as the SEO-optimized domains of the early 2000s), or uninspiring short adjectives (such as “top…x,” “best…x,” “hot…x”) aren’t always the best choice. This isn’t a hard and fast rule, but in the world of naming conventions in general, if everyone else is doing it, that doesn’t mean it is a surefire strategy. Just look at all the people who named their businesses “AAA… x” over the past 50 years to be first in the phone book; how many Fortune 1000s are named “AAA company?”

Use an AJAX domain selection tool

Websites such as Ajaxwhois and Domjax make it exceptionally easy to determine the availability of a domain name. Just remember that you don’t have to buy through these services. You can find an available name that you like, and then go to your registrar of choice.

2. Picking the Right URLs

Search engines place some weight on keywords in your URLs. Be careful, though. The search engines can interpret long URLs with numerous hyphens in them (e.g., Buy-this-awesome-product-now.html) as a spam signal. What follows are some guidelines for selecting optimal URLs for the pages of your site(s).

Describe your content

An obvious URL is a great URL. If a user can look at the Address bar (or a pasted link) and make an accurate guess about the content of the page before ever reaching it, you’ve done your job. These URLs get pasted, shared, emailed, written down, and yes, even recognized by the engines.

Keep it short

Brevity is a virtue. The shorter the URL, the easier to copy and paste, read over the phone, write on a business card, or use in a hundred other unorthodox fashions, all of which spell better usability and increased branding.

Static is the way

The search engines treat static URLs differently than dynamic ones. Users also are not fond of URLs in which the big players are ?, &, and =. They are just harder to read and understand.

Descriptives are better than numbers

If you’re thinking of using “114/cat223/” you should go with “/brand/adidas/” instead. Even if the descriptive isn’t a keyword or particularly informative to an uninitiated user, it is far better to use words when possible. If nothing else, your team members will thank you for making it that much easier to identify problems in development and testing.

Keywords never hurt

If you know you’re going to be targeting a lot of competitive keyword phrases on your website for search traffic, you’ll want every advantage you can get. Keywords are certainly one element of that strategy, so take the list from marketing, map it to the proper pages, and get to work. For dynamically created pages through a CMS, create the option of including keywords in the URL.

Subdomains aren’t always the answer

First off, never use multiple subdomains (e.g., Siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com): they are unnecessarily complex and lengthy. Second, consider that subdomains have the potential to be treated separately from the primary domain when it comes to passing link and trust value. In most cases where just a few subdomains are used and there’s good interlinking, it won’t hurt, but be aware of the downsides.

Fewer folders

A URL should contain no unnecessary folders (or words or characters, for that matter). They do not add to the user experience of the site and can in fact confuse users.

Hyphens separate best

When creating URLs with multiple words in the format of a phrase, hyphens are best to separate the terms (e.g., /brands/dolce-and-gabbana/), but you can also use plus signs (+).

Stick with conventions

If your site uses a single format throughout, don’t consider making one section unique. Stick to your URL guidelines once they are established so that your users (and future site developers) will have a clear idea of how content is organized into folders and pages. This can apply globally as well for sites that share platforms, brands, and so on.

Don’t be case-sensitive

Since URLs can accept both uppercase and lowercase characters, don’t ever, ever allow any uppercase letters in your structure. Unix/Linux-based web servers are case-sensitive, so http://www.domain.com/Products/widgets/ is technically a different URL from http://www.domain.com/products/widgets/. Note that this is not true in Microsoft IIS servers, but there are a lot of Apache web servers out there. In addition, this is confusing to users, and potentially to search engine spiders as well. If you have them now, 301 them to all-lowercase versions to help avoid confusion. If you have a lot of type-in traffic, you might even consider a 301 rule that sends any incorrect capitalization permutation to its rightful home.

Don’t append extraneous data

There is no point in having a URL exist in which removing characters generates the same content. You can be virtually assured that people on the Web will figure it out, link to you in different fashions, confuse themselves, their readers, and the search engines (with duplicate content issues), and then complain about it.