Different Types of Domains and Best Practices for SEO

What is a domain name? It can be considerably more than you realize when it comes to SEO.

Your domain name conveys information about who you are, the services you offer, and your brand’s positioning online. Your internet presence may come off as friendlier or less friendlier to enquiring human visitors, depending on what you decide to register.

The majority of the material you publish on your websites—including your landing pages, products, and content—is impacted by domain SEO. The success of your brand depends on your ability to precisely understand how your domain name influences web traffic and page rankings.

Starting with its true definition, let’s examine the fundamentals of domain SEO.

Definition of Domain SEO

Domain SEO is the process of enhancing owned domains to increase their usability for both search engines and human visitors. To construct the ideal web identity, you must choose a short phrase, a possible subdomain, and a top-level domain (TLD).

Unlike what many people think, domain SEO is distinct from webpage or URL SEO:

•         Optimizing your website’s digital content, such as copy, photos, and related buttons, is a component of webpage SEO.

·         Title tag optimization, link anchor text optimization, and URL SEO are the main areas of concentration.

•         The sole goal of domain SEO is to improve the name of your registered domain.

·         It’s best to combine domain name SEO with other optimization techniques, such as on-page, off-page, and technical methods. It will be simpler to develop other SEO tactics the more time you invest in creating a simplified, professional domain name.

Does the domain name affect SEO?

The length, keywords, and extension of a domain name are essential elements of an SEO strategy. A reputable, narrowly focused, and straightforward domain name will draw more attention from users and search engines.

You can be tempted to believe that domain names are not as significant as other SEO components. But consider www.cheap-discounted-jeans.net or freeshippingforlife.biz as examples. Both of these areas lack significant confidence.

In fact, based solely on their names, you might be more inclined to think of these addresses as scams. Both search engines and customers are very aware of this.

Another thing to keep in mind is that sponsored advertisements are just as valuable and powerful as organic ones, so it’s always a good idea to spend money on expert Google AdWords management.

Domain SEO Best Practices

The best strategy to choose your next SEO domain name is to keep keywords in mind, take shorter names into account, and prioritize straightforward or simplified terminology.

Even while you might not suddenly find yourself on Google’s front page, you will be establishing your domain in excellent practices from the start and earning a ton of benefits as a result.

Here are five practical suggestions for selecting a domain name that is search engine-friendly.

1. Pick relevant keywords

Over time, the significance of using keywords in a domain has changed. Throughout the early 2000s, it was utilized by hundreds of thousands of e-commerce brands and was once a staple of search indexing on websites like Google. Even in today’s condensed SEO for domains, keywords still have a role to play.

Nowadays, domains can receive search engine boosts without explicitly including keywords in their names. However, adding a notion or two to help people understand your brand isn’t necessarily a bad idea.

2. Create a memorable domain name

Aim for domain names that are brief, simple to remember, simple to type, and simple to pronounce. This is important for processing fluency as well as word-of-mouth marketing as those visitors will need to go directly to your domain.

Processing fluency, an implicit cognitive bias, is the idea that things that are simple to speak and simple to think about—including pronounceability in our own minds—are remembered and have more positive connections. Therefore, avoid using domain names that are longer than 15 characters or that contain numerals or other non-standard characters, uncommon spellings, or both.

The more easily a domain (or URL) can be read by people, the better it is for search engines, as their reliance on accessibility and usability as a ranking criterion grows.

3. Try to stay away from hyphens

You might wish to use a hyphen to make your domain name more readable if it consists of two words (like www.examplesite.com): www.example-site.com. However, keep in mind that the usage of hyphens also negatively affects the readability and recall of domain names and is significantly correlated with spammy behavior. As a result, generally speaking, only one hyphen should be used (if any must be used at all).

4. Prevent using non-.com top-level domains (TLDs)

A webmaster will frequently have the opportunity to purchase extra TLDs when registering a domain name. Consider acquiring the.com TLD if you want to increase the amount of direct visitors to a domain. .net,.co, or a well-known ccTLD are suggested as backups if the.com TLD for a domain name you’re looking to buy isn’t available.

Additionally, purchasing low-quality TLDs like.biz,.info,.ws, or.name as a way to boost traffic is not advised for SEO-conscious webmasters. These TLDs receive far less traffic than the more well-known domains due to their lesser popularity, and they may also be more frequently linked to spam activity.

5. Prefer subdomains over subfolders and subdirectories

Although Google has acknowledged that content in subdomains and subdirectories is treated roughly equally from a ranking perspective, it is still advised that webmasters place link-worthy content like blogs in subfolders rather than subdomains (i.e. www.example.com/blog/ rather than blog.example.com). This is because search engines keep different metrics for domains than they do for subdomains.

7. Domain changes

There are several important things to think about when a webmaster needs to switch from one domain to another, including how to set up redirects on a page-by-page basis so that sub-folders and deep content pages are led to equivalent sub-folders and deep content pages on the new domain. All page redirects to the homepage of another domain should be avoided by SEOs.

You can choose an SEO-friendly domain name that continues to pay off long after registration with some commitment and advance forethought.