RAFICHOWDHURY

How To Choose Search Engine Friendly Domain Names

|

Choosing-SEO-Friendly-Domain-Names

Are you the one who is struggling to choose SEO friendly domain names ?
Stick to this 2300+ word article to guide you how to move forward.

Keys to Choosing a Search Engine Friendly Domain Names

Friendly Domain Names

For any business with an online footprint, SEO seems like the end-all be-all.
And, maybe without even knowing it, the name brainstorm will be the first keyword research of every startup founder.

Also Read :

  1. The Complete Guide To Increasing Your Website’s Domain Authority
  2. 11 Effective Tips to Boost Article Writing Skills
  3. Best Free Web Hosting Company – Hostinger, Comparison & Review

Unless you are taking an old brick and mortar online whose name isn’t available for your preferred TLD, using the same name for your business and website domain will make your SEO job easier.

How to Choose SEO friendly domain names?

Friendly Domain Names

For any business with an online footprint, SEO seems like the end-all be-all.
And, maybe without even knowing it, the name brainstorm will be the first keyword research of every startup founder.

Also Read :

  1. The Complete Guide To Increasing Your Website’s Domain Authority
  2. 11 Effective Tips to Boost Article Writing Skills
  3. Best Free Web Hosting Company – Hostinger, Comparison & Review

Unless you are taking an old brick and mortar online whose name isn’t available for your preferred TLD, using the same name for your business and website domain will make your SEO job easier.

Why Is A Search-Friendly Domain Name Important?

A search engine friendly domain name will make your business easy to find online. For that, you need to build a familial feel around your name, wherever people may encounter it online.

This could be;

  1. When casually surfing the internet,
  2. Sniffing out the more interesting bits from their Facebook feed,
  3. Looking for answers on Quora, or
  4. Shopping on Amazon.

People should immediately recognize your name and associate it with you.

There is a bucketload of reasons why you should invest in SEO in general. But, most of the time, the working assumption is the business already has a distinguishable identity.

Not many people give much importance to how finding the right business name makes finding that identity more painless and a lot cheaper.

What Qualities Needed Before Hiring A Good Essay Writer

Granted, if you find rapid, Dropbox-like market traction, the celebrity behind your business should make your SEO job easier. But just how much does Dropbox owe its success to its choice of name?

And how many startups can come up with a product so novel that everyone needs but don’t realise it?

Friendly Domain Names

After the product itself, the choice of name is the first thing Dropbox founder, Drew Houston nailed.

How To Find An SEO-Friendly Domain Name

When prospects type your name into Google, they should find your website on top of the SERPs, period.

For all the terms your business can rank for in search engines, your company name should be the first.

Provided it is brandable, it should also be pretty easy to rank for your own registered business name. A brandable domain name creates a unique online identity that no one can imitate.

‘Unique’ really is the operative word here. Your name isn’t unique if it can be easily associated with something unrelated to your business.

If you are set on using a not-so-unique phrase for your domain name, then consider appending a clarifying keyword to give it a distinguishable identity.

How to make money online fast without spending anything

Here are a few other do’s and dont’s to stay mindful of as you brainstorm your company and domain names.

  • Your Domain Name Should Be Easy To Read And Spell

To be brandable, a company name should be easy for people to memorize.

Your domain name should be short, and easy to pronounce and spell. This also applies just as much for search engines as it does for humans.

If people struggle to spell and pronounce your company name, search engines are going to have just as much difficulty reading it.

And search bots hate that. They have too many sites to crawl to spend time trying to decode what you are about. For all the trouble, they will push your website down the ranking order.

A short domain name also mean your urls will be short. These are easier to type and reduce typos when typing them into the search bar. Short domains are also easier to remember.

Here Is Your 6-Step Guide To Making Money Online from Your Website

This explains why short urls tend to have higher CTRs.

  • Reconsider Domain Names With Multiple Words

Search engines won’t have a problem reading a domain name with multiple words.

However, when concatenated (strung together without spaces), search engines will parse (separate) them in any one of possible word combinations.

The result could be something you never intended, like these unintentionally inappropriate domain names.

Such domain name fails can turn your domain into the butt of internet jokes, frustrate your SEO efforts, and hurt your brand.

  • Avoid Common, Everyday Words In Your Name

You want to choose a name that, hopefully, describes what your product or business does. Even better will be a name that describes how using your product will benefit its users.

Succeeding with this one thing is incredibly beneficial for your business’ prospects.

But make sure that name is unique.

You want to avoid common and tired words like advanced, supreme, best, etc. The chances for a startup ranking for a name with such words are slim, at best.

There is going to be bigger businesses with larger budgets who either have a similar sounding name or are targeting the same keywords.

Nicole Badrudeen And The Gorgeous Skin Handbook Both Know How To Save Your Day

Besides, some of these words have been used so much they have lost the power they once carried.

You could add or drop a vowel, or even add a cutesy domain extension and make it part of your registered name.

But giving up the .com domain isn’t particularly wise either.

Unless you are going to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on SEO and advertising, you are best served steering clear of stock-phrase business names.

  • Stay Away From Keyword-Stuffed Names

Anyone who has ever done any SEO will tell you the best keyword to target is one with high search volume and low competition.

Needless to say, such keywords are almost impossible to find, because everyone is looking for them. There is almost always high competition for the most profitable keywords.

Why not just adopt that keyword for your business name and lock everyone out in the process? That would solve it, wouldn’t it? Something like;

‘Best Hair Dresser In New York’

Besides, we are taught that long tail keywords are the best ones to target. They attract warmer leads and convert better, because they are more targeted.

Except Google won’t rank a URL that reads, www.best-hair-dresser-in-new-york.com.

Known as Exact Match Domains (EMDs), these used to work, back when SEO was all about populatinging your whole website with your choice keywords.

EMDs are now so black hat that Google hardly pays attention to them as a ranking factor.

If you are not careful with the content you publish on the site, an EMD can actually get you a penalty from the search engine.

Avoid keyword stuffed names. Unless you can get creative, as some of these people have done.

A partial or exact match domain won’t do much for your business as a ranking factor. But it can still be helpful for driving your CTR.

A domain name that is recognizable with the product you are selling will, especially when set against unrelated or generic domain names, likely encourage people to want to check your site out.

But because it isn’t a powerful ranking factor anymore, you will have to publish great content. Only after you have hit the top few positions in the SERPs should you expect your EMD to give you a CTR legup.

An EMD should just be one, and not, the only element in your SEO strategy. Valuable content that will resonate with your target audience should be the endgame.

Still on the subject of EMDs:

  • Opt For A Brandable Business Name Over An EMD

SEO has become so ubiquitous that it is easy to forget that good old brands, and a great product, are still the foundation on which scalable, profitable businesses are built.

A brandable domain name, which is short, unique, easy to spell, and memorable, is more relatable and easier to rank for than long-tail-keyword names.

Why you need a website?

If your domain name is longer than 15 characters, chances are people will not have time to type it into the search bar.

Consider the experience of people accessing your site from a mobile device for one. Those small screens aren’t really made for typing, are they?

Short, punchier domain names are better. Think;

  1. Apple,
  2. Amazon,
  3. Twitter,
  4. Google.
  5. Prudently.

Perhaps it is wiser to reverse engineer the whole search-friendly domain name brainstorm process.

Seeing that an EMD isn’t much help if not supported by good quality content, why not start with a brandable name and concentrate your SEO efforts on researching keyword based content ideas and publishing search-friendly content your audience will find appealing.

With time, people will start to associate your domain with your target keywords. This helps to build the right signals around your brand, and ultimately lead to a stronger domain authority.

In any event, after landing on your site, and to guarantee any return traffic, visitors should find valuable, up-to-date content.

  • Avoid Using Numbers And Hyphens In Your Name

Using numbers may have worked for 3M. But the company predates the internet by a good few decades.

3M has had a long time to build a strong brand and now has little risk of people getting confused about whether to spell the ‘3’ or write the numeral.

If the company was starting out today that name would certainly cause a headache or two for the company’s digital marketers.

Get The Free Web Hosting Services With The Zero Additional Cost

The same applies for hyphens. People aren’t wired to include these when typing out a name. Using them in your domain name would cost you traffic that, as a startup, you can’t afford to lose.

Make your SEO job easier by excluding any character that may confuse people or which have alternate spellings.

  • Check Your Preferred Name’s Availability On Social Sites

It is pretty standard practice these days:

As soon you have a registered company name, you will also want to quickly register a website.

But there is now another name search test your preferred company name will need to pass. It is the social media name availability.

When it first emerged, some businesses turned their noses up at social media. Well, that was before they realized what a powerful marketing channel it is.

Spencer Mecham Is Ready To Move You Away From The Boring 9-to-5 Routine

Now they don’t have much of a choice.

This is especially important when you are using your own name for company name. Imagine the chances of a name like John Smith still being available on Facebook or Twitter!

It is crucial that you keep a consistent identity across all your online properties. As such, you will want to ensure your preferred name is not only available for the .com domain registration but on the major social media channels as well.

A handy tool for checking your name for both domain and social username availability is Namecheckr.com:

Friendly Domain Names

Namecheckr will quickly check your name’s availability for the major TLDs and social networks

  • Avoid Three Letter Acronyms For Your Name

Abbreviated company names used to be all the rage back in the day.

Three letter acronyms were especially popular, which is why they will make such a poor choice of name today. Most of the common English language acronyms are already in use somewhere in the world.

Focus Keywords: What They Are and How to Choose Them for Your Business Blog

Even if you can get the name registered in your own country, there is a good chance some company on the internet uses the same acronym for their company and domain name.

Adding a clarifying keyword to the name will help, but ranking for such a name will still be prove more difficult than it should.

You will however have little choice than to just use your acronym based business name for your domain name if your business is already an established brand.

  • Choose A .com Domain Name

It is now best practice to check the .com availability for your preferred name before you even register the company name.

It is even better to reconsider your choice of name if you can’t get a .com domain for it. There is a reason why 75% of all websites have a .com domain.

The .com TLD dwarfs all other domain suffixes in terms of market share. So, without even a second thought, the average person will assume your website to be a dot com domain.

Cyber Security in 2018 – Predictions And Expectations

You could thus very easily direct traffic away from your website.

The internet is a very big place that has dramatically slashed people’s attention spans. Very few people will go to the trouble of actively searching for your site after they have been directed to a wrong site.

They will be typing in your competitor’s name a heartbeat after landing on what they had hoped was your site.

Optimize For Humans First, And Then For Search Engines

Search engines love brands.

Maybe that’s because a company that is willing to nurture and carefully grow its brand identity is more likely to invest in creating helpful content for its target audience.

On the contrary, you would think sites with keyword-stuffed domain names as the ones likely to use spammy tactics to get clicks and page views.

Brand focused domain names are easier to remember and connect with.

Besides looking spammy, your keyword domain name will also find it hard to rise to the top when confronted with competitors using a similar tactic.

000WebHost – Test Your Coding Skills & Build Website For Free

A short, memorable domain name that is thematically relevant is a more scalable asset in terms of SEO.

With quality content, a brandable domain is easier to rank for than one that’s stuffed with keywords for the sole goal of tricking search engines into giving it a higher SERPs ranking.

In the end, it is the power of your brand and the quality of your content, determined by metrics like low bounce rate, backlink profile, and longer retention times, that will earn your site the higher keyword rankings you seek.

If you need examples of good names you might want to check out a brandable domain name marketplace like BrandableHQ. These businesses compile collections of names meeting the above criteria and looking at their collections can get you in the snappy and brandable name storming mood.

It all starts with that company name. Make it brandable.

One Response

Comments are closed.

Contact Info