SEO Step By Step Guide: 4. Domain Name Selection Industry Best Practices

In the previous post, we saw that the domain names that we select should be keyword rich to enhance the power of our domains in terms of SEO. This is only one of the aspects of selecting a domain name. There are other factors that need to be taken into consideration to leverage the maximum benefit from our domain name. Here are few industry’s best practices in finalizing our domain names.

First of all, try to avoid abbreviations in your domain names unless it is a keyword in itself. For the convenience of the users, shorter and meaningful domain names are easily remembered. That is one of the advantages of choosing a keyword rich domain name. The domain name will be linked with the service or the product that you offer and hence it can be easily remembered. If your domain name is too long, there are chances that your website’s visitors make mistakes while typing the long domain name and you will lose a certain portion of your website’s visitors owing to typographical errors. This would be one of the silliest ways of losing your visitors but still it would hurt your conversion rates. So always try to keep your domain name as short as possible.

At onetime hyphenation was used in domain names to separate words. Today it is not necessary. Search engines have become really intelligent to recognize whole words in the given string. People will find it difficult to remember the hyphens in the URL. So to make it easy for them, strip your website URL of all hyphenations. You must also keep in mind that it can be easily pronounced. There are number of situations whereby you will be giving your website address to your customers over the phone verbally so the domain names should be easily understandable. Always use correct spellings in the domain name and this will increase the chances of getting the right domain name the first time when you mention it. If you are not clear in this regard, you would be sending your potential customers to your competitor’s website.

Another important tip to note, which is often not taken into consideration, is the domain names starting alphabets. We have seen a number of directories that list the websites alphabetically so if you can help try to use higher alphabets as the starting letters. Only webmasters who are very meticulous about building a perfectly SEO friendly website that takes into consideration all the aspects of driving traffic to their website pay attention to minor details like these.

What used to be one of the best practices sometime ago is now no more the best practice and that is using the plural forms in the domain name. It is advisable to use the plural form of the words as long as it does not make your domain name sound awkward. For example when people want to reserve a table in a hotel in New York will be using the keywords, “hotels New York” when they don’t know the hotel name or they will use the singular form only when they know the name of the hotel in which they like to reserve a table. When they are making general searches for hotels, they will use the plural form so it is best to use words in their plural form in your domain name.

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