Importance of Domain Names for SEO

Many domain names are educational, some are entertaining, whereas others just don’t make any sense at all. The domain of your business is a valuable commodity and a keyword-relevant name can be a tremendous help to the search engine optimization (SEO) of your website.

Obviously, there are a lot of factors that contribute to a brand’s SEO, including web design, content, PR, link building, and pay-per-click (PPC). To get all of these factors right, businesses often hire an entire digital marketing or SEO team from the likes of Riverbank Digital whose expertise can help with online brand presence. Just having an exact domain name isn’t enough to make you rank highly in search engines like Google.

However, it is the first step in making the site look legitimate, which can lead to increased traffic on the website as well as a greater number of people signing up for your weekly or monthly newsletters. Moreover, you can use their data to build a personal relationship with them, likely through cold calling (this can also be outsourced from a reputed cold calling company) or email marketing, now that you know they are interested in the products or services provided by you.

For example, if you sell computer screens, having the domain www.computer-screens.com is far more likely to rank you for the key term “computer screen” than devicesforthehome.com.

Domain Name Disputes:

Believe it or not but the number of domain name disputes has hit a record high. The World Wide Web has never been more important for a business’s success and therefore big-named brands like Gucci, Armani and Apple are working hard to evict ‘cybersquatters’.

What is a cybersquatter?
It is when an individual registers a web domain linked to a famous brand so they can either sell counterfeit goods, or demand money from the brand owner before they relinquish ownership.

Gucci for instance, is claiming that it should hold ownership of the domain guccishoponline.org rather than an anonymous e-commerce company. Meanwhile, Apple filed a case earlier this year and won for control of the domain iphone5.com.

Further famous brands that have taken up dispute cases consist of Armani, Burberry, Cartier, Dior and Swarovski.

Many industry experts argue that brands will receive huge benefits from a .brand domain name which was launched in early 2012. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has given businesses the opportunity to enter the .brand era of URLs to allow firms to branch out worldwide.

Maybe sometimes it’s a simple matter of getting the right domain name registration done at the right time. Facebook paid $8.5 million to get fb.com. The domain had been owned by the American Farm Bureau Federation, which used it as its primary domain.

How to choose a domain for SEO?

If you are launching a business and in the process of building a new website, make sure you thoroughly research the domain names on offer.

Here are some tips for choosing:

• Google tends to give weight to domain names with keywords in them
• Related to your business
• spelling and grammar free
• easy to market in terms of pronunciation
• avoid hyphenated
• .com’s can sell for 5-20 times as much as a .org or .net

firstbaptistcumming.org, analemma.org, therapistfinder.com and thelongestdomainnameintheworldandthensomeandthensomemoreandmore.com are just some of the craziest and funniest domain names on the internet.

Conclusion:
Now you know just how crucial your business’s domain name is to your overall success, have a look at your own domain and ask yourself does it have rankabilty, linkability and is it SEO-friendly? If it doesn’t you may need to invest in a new domain.

This article was provided by Custard, the specialist marketing and web design Manchester based firm. Speak to the experts today to boost your presence online with search.