Web domains and search engine optimization

Whether you are buying a new domain to develop and to sell, or whether you want to run it for the long-term as a money-making enterprise, you should think about the use of site optimization in the development process.

If it is to make your domain name more valuable for a purchaser with regular traffic to its pages, or for the sake of your profits (for which you also need regular, and hopefully growing levels of traffic), optimization is vital unless you are simply going to promote by pay-per-click.

Firstly, the myths. It is generally agreed among the top SEO commentators that key words in the domain itself have no effect on the results rankings of site pages. The days are long gone where search engine algorithms could be conned by simple tricks like creating a domain called buy-keyword1–keyword2.com. The internal page names, if they include keywords, may have some effect, though this too is doubtful.

So, when selecting your new domain name, you shouldn't be concerned when you find all the top domains are already registered. The search results will show the domain name to those searching, but that is the only possible advantage of keywords in a domain name.

Another myth is that using pay-per-click on your new domain will get it picked up, get the spiders in, and give it a push up in the search engine rankings. This has been shown to be just not the case, and is the result of wishful thinking.

Acquire incoming links from other sites, and the spiders will arrive soon enough.

Include useful content, and the search engines will learn to love you. If you can't think of original content, get a writer who can. The shortcuts to collecting web content – scraping that of others, lifting pages from directories, and all the gray and black hat techniques either don't work or will just set your site up for 1000th place in the listings.

Don't worry about keyword density, just focus your pages on a natural, coherent subject. In fact, do not think about the search engines at all. Your goal should be to give something really dood to your real audience – your human visitors.

Trying to validate your new site to W3C standard is a complete waste of your time. Any search engine would have to exclude 99% of the web from its results if it used this as a ranking technique. Use the time saved to create new pages.

Don't pay to place your new domain in paid directories, or directories selling PR-based links. In the past this worked, but the search engine algorithms no longer give much weight to tricks like this. Just consider – a rich company could buy its way to the top of the listings for every phrase it wanted, if buying links actually worked: and it would eliminate the value of the search engines to their users. This is precisely Google and the other engines want to prevent at all costs.

OK, the search engines can still make errors. Some sites, however good and original their content and however prolific their incoming links, just never get anywhere in the search results. Get another domain and move on.

Keep reading – see my site for more about registering domain names.