How domain names affect your website SEO
Why do you think parents spend a lot of time in deciding their child’s name? Because a child’s name is going to define his overall personality for years to come. Similarly, the name of a website defines the website for the users. Since there is no certainty about the factors affecting your website SEO, the name of your website plays a vital role in it. While you might wonder how, let us discuss it here.
Keyword game
In the good old days, Google worked differently with leniency towards ranking a website higher in the search engine result pages. But the tables have turned now, and Google has rigid norms for people to develop a website. In the yesteryears, people used to buy keyword domain names to list their website higher in the results page. But now when the crawlers have become smarter, and they look up for the trustworthy and relevant websites to display the users, people are buying domain names that have a brand and relevancy signal.
Let’s take an example to understand it further:
Gautam decided to build an online portal for people to buy books online. While his online store would have a wide array of books from novel to academic, he decided to get a domain name that would reflect his store and will be searched by most of the users for any book. As he searched the internet for popular keywords, he made a note of buy book online, books online, buy online books, etc. were the most searched keywords. His research made him buy the domain name buybooks.com as the other popular searched keyword domain names were taken.
Considering the above-stated example, if we talk about the late 90s, buybooks.com would have been a popular website. However, in 2018, this trick will not work. If we look logically and fundamentally, crawlers have a million of websites to crawl according to the searched query and it crawls on numerous basis. When a user searches for buy book in Google, the crawler will cross all the boundations to provide the best website to the user. Let’s consider there are 10000 websites with the relevant data and similar domain name, that the crawler crawls for this keyword, so the chances of a website to rank on the first page are 1/10000. Now if a domain name is not that of a keyword, but it is a brand name with the relevant data for the crawler to crawl among 100 websites, then hasn’t your chances increased?
A brand domain name contributes in :
Higher click-through rate: 37% of users click more on a link that provides a brand name to them.
More trust: You will always trust a link that will show the brand name, rather than a keyword in the domain.
Increase brand potential: The value of a brand increases with its visibility in the SERPs.
More attention in SERPs: Crawlers value the brand name more than the keyword in the domain name.
It is recommended to name your website in a global English language, if your website is globally targeted. The language of a domain name contributes equally to the SEO of your website.
TLDs
The Top-Level Domain (TLD) of your domain name determines a lot of things of a website. While a geographical TLD boosts the website SEO for the targeted country, a generic TLD makes the website unique in its own sense. The extension after the domain name of a website, is called the TLD, i.e., .com, .in, .eu, .uk, etc.
But what are the different type of TLDs?
Geological TLD: Geological TLD is targeted for a particular country. The crawler crawls the TLD of a website to provide direct traffic from the targeted country. While .com brings global traffic, .in targets Indian audience, .eu targets European audience for the website.
Generic TLD: Did you ever come across TLDs like, .blog, .pizza, .photo, or anything weird like this? These are called generic TLDs and they help boost the SEO in accord with the extension of the domain name. However, most generic TLD websites are considered to be spammy as well.
Organisational TLD: An organisational or educational institute has a different TLD, .org, .edu, respectively to differentiate the website from other websites. This builds the trust of the user that the website would be an official site of the organisation.
Domain Authority
The domain authority (DA) of a website determine its position in the searched engine result pages. If an existing website has a high DA, and you buy the domain name for your website, then automatically the crawler will replace the existing website with yours and will boost your website’s SEO. Although this is a rare case, your site structure, the response time of your website, the relevancy of the information, increase the domain authority of a website and that will certainly boost the website SEO.
The age of a domain name doesn’t matter as much as it used to in the old days, yet the backlinks will be effected through this. You would have shared the link to your website on multiple platforms as a backlink, and thus the crawler will not be able to identify your new domain name unless you 301 redirect it.
As a summary SEO and domain name combines to :
1. Increased credibility
2. Higher link values
3. More direct traffic
Only if you:
1. Use the right TLD
2. Use short and memorable domain name
3. Avoid exact match keyword domain
4. Be typable – avoid special characters in the domain name
Make your domain name powerful for crawlers to rank it higher in the search engine results and boost your website’s SEO.
