Cog SEO Blog

Posted By Melanie Prough on May 7, 2009

I know this isn’t a well covered subject sometimes. The strength (SEO Value) of your domain name was reported in Search Engine Ranking Factors V2 by SEOmoz in 4/2007. The study was completed by 37 of the top SEO professionals in the world. They report that using a top/strong keyword in your domain name is rated 3 out of 5 important and effective. Next, you’ll want to know this; it’s rated 2.8 important/effective to have keywords in page URLs.

Most popular TLDs (Top Level Domain)

1. .com – stands for commercial – for your Internet Business.
2. .net – stands for network.
3. .org – stands for organization. Non commercial.
4. gov – stands for government. All government web sites use this.
5. .biz – stands for business.
6. .edu — for educational sites
7. .mil — for military sites

There are more, but popularity equals user trust and recognition. People are used to spam/adult sites being flooded into their email boxes from the other .99c domains like .info, .us etc. Just avoid them
So whats in a domain name? Usually 2 opportunities; SEO strength, and marketing advantage. When you choose a domain name there are some basic fundamentals to follow for success and legal ESE. Lets cover those first.

• Do a Trademark check here, and search the Internet Archive for a site at that domain. If you find either, move on unless they are expired or passed more than 5 years.
• I recommend you not register a .net that matches an existing .com for example. Just find another name, the legal issues can be expensive…and you would lose.
• Find a “catchy”, easy to remember name that will be easiest to market. Most common words are taken, but many times I will use the Thesaurus to get similar meaning words and try those.
• Keyword first if possible…Like SEOCog instead of COGSEO. The engine reads left to right, they figure more important things are first.
• Avoid hyphens
• Try for a .com or .org (.gov, .edu) as these are more easily recognized and traditionally rank higher.
• Register your aliases to protect yourself, and have a back up should your site get penalized you have a working domain ready to put a new site up.
• Register your domain for more that 1 year, it carries some SEO power there also. They figure if it expires in less than a year you don’t mean business.
• Watch the length. People forget easier if its longer, and your page addresses may not fit in online forms.
• Stay to not more than 2 concurrent words
• Avoid underscores
• Avoid easily misspelled words
• Relevance is everything….SEO has great keyword strength, but it won’t help a lawnmower site.
• Do a keyword density crawl on who will be your top competitor. Take the top 30 or so real word and chose a keyword from there.
• Don’t rush…this is a lasting decision, because changing it is SEO suicide.

Those are the basic factors to consider. Now what about marketing vs. SEO? In a perfect world you will always have both, but that’s just not always the case. I think swap out SEO for high impact marketing strength of a domain name in a heartbeat! What I mean is, say for example you are doing a website for a very well known local company. It is very likely that companies name marketability can do more for the site that the SEO keyword in the domain name. You have to weigh it out. Marketing is limitless in what you can get out of it short and long term, while SEO power in your domain name will likely return the same results long term.

Peace and SEO

Melanie Prough

Categories: SEO General
Tags: Domain Name, Educational Sites, Internet Archive, Internet Business, Marketing Power, Search Engine, Seo, Top Level Domain, Trademark Search