Search Engine Optimisation Advice

Many people do not realise that purchasing a domain is no different to purchasing something else important like a car. The majority of people would not hand over their hard earned money for a car without at least checking whether the car has been in any accidents and checking the service history.

The reason behind this is that it gives you a sense that the car we are buying is exactly what we think it is. So why should buying a domain be any different? After all your domain is part of your reputation as a business, if the domain is already known for something negative by general consumers or by the search engines then you are already purchasing a bad reputation in the online world – which can easily extend into the offline world if you have a bricks and mortar business.

An important step for anyone thinking about purchasing a domain is to do some research into its past using the waybackwhenmachine. The waybackwhenmachine is an internet archive of website caches dating back to 1996, by going to http://www.archive.org/web/web.php and searching for the domain you are interested in, you can see whether the domain was once used for anything suspect e.g. the adult industry or gambling content etc. If you find that the domain was once used for such a reason then it is highly recommended that you look for an alternative domain as Google and the other search engines will have a historical record that this domain was once used for something that is not in their eyes seen to be positive and could therefore be on a black list.

Domains play a big part in search engine optimisation as they are in an ideal world the first indicator of what the website content is going to be about. This article aims to help people understand the basics of what to look for in a domain to allow any search engine optimisation to be functioning at its best.

Search engine optimisation should always be in the back of your mind when looking to purchase a new domain name. The structure and content of the domain name can give your site an edge if you select wisely.

For this example we shall pretend that we have setup a new business called Smith & Brothers Ltd who sell solar panels.

Step 1 Content:

The content of the domain name can play a big part in brand/product recognition as well as improving ranking potential for certain keywords.

Where most business make the mistake is to obtain the domain name of their business, in this case something like www.smithandbrothers.co.uk and use this as their primary domain for the website. There is no harm in obtaining this type of domain name to protect your brand identity but it shows no use in product recognition and gives no benefit to search engine optimisation.

It would be much more useful to look for a domain containing the words “solar panels” e.g. www.solarpanels.co.uk. This domain would tell both users and search engines what your site is about without even having to visit which should result in a higher organic click through rate and a boost when it comes to search engine optimisation.

Step 2 Structure:

In our example the domain www.solarpanels.co.uk may have already been registered and in use which means that we have to get creative to get the keywords that are important into the domain name. This would leave us with options of names like:

www.smithssolarpanels.co.uk / www.smiths_solar_panels.co.uk / www.smiths-solar-panels.co.uk

All three options above incorporate the keywords we want in the domain name with the added bonus of having some of the business name branding as well, however each version has a very distinct style, two of which are not ideal for seo.

The 1^st version is not in an ideal format for users and search engines alike. With this particular example you would expect a reasonable percentage of users to type in the domain name incorrectly due to the presence of two s characters next to each other, some people will try to spell it with just the one. From a search engine point of view the words are all concatenated with no spaces meaning that we are relying on the search engine to be clever enough to separate these 3 words in order to gain the boost of having keywords in the domain name. Although search engines are always getting smarter there is no guarantee that all of them will be able to do this, missing out on potential traffic.

The 2^nd version has split the 3 keywords out by using an underscore. This makes it easier for the user to type and reduces the potential mistakes that could be made but unfortunately the underscore character is not recognized by the search engines as a valid spacing character and is therefore ignored, meaning from a search engine point of view we are left in the same situation as the 1^st version we have already discussed.

The 3^rd version is the optimum version of presenting a complicated domain name of 3 or more keywords. By using the hyphen character as the spacing element it reduces the mistakes made by users and is also recognized by the search engines as a spacing character resulting in a keyword boost.

Every online and offline business owner is concerned about how to increase profitability. With a traditional ‘bricks and mortar’ business it is usually very difficult (if not impossible) to judge key statistics beyond how many sales were taken that day. Eg; How many people walked past my shop today? Of those people how many came into my shop? Without this key information it is very hard to determine how well a business stands out in a busy market place.

This is where online business has the advantage. Online advertising such as Google’s pay per click provide key statistics to show any advertiser exactly how many people viewed their advertisement (impressions), how many people clicked to see more information (click through rate) and with conversion tracking you can actually see how many people went on to purchase your product.

With this information it is possible to make changes to your campaign to increase your AdWords conversion rate; however there is a large amount of information that Google AdWords does not provide that is critical to having a fully optimised campaign.

This is where having an analytics (statistics) package can take your business and profit to the next level. By integrating your PPC campaign with Google’s Analytics package you can view data to show you how well your PPC campaign is really performing.

You will now be able to view key information such as how well your landing pages are performing, what times of the day people are most likely to purchase and what region or country does your conversion rate shoot through the ceiling or fall through the floor.

There are many factors beyond the keywords and ad text that go into making a fully optimised pay per click campaign, getting analytics on your side is just the beginning.