Only a few years back, you could be a successful entrepreneur without the need of a website. And the reason for this was very simple, before the nineties there was no Internet! With the introduction of the Internet, things changed drastically. And nowadays, it is impossible to even think of a globally successful enterprise that does not have an online presence. But what is more important is the fact, that just the presence of a visually appealing, information rich and well crafted website is not enough to get your company noticed on the internet. It has to be correctly marketed online through certain procedures so that it is prominently indexed by search engines. This is the primary reason why SEO or Search Engine Optimization has become such an important key to Internet business success. 

We all know the importance of search engine rankings these days. Therefore, choosing a SEO friendly domain name means that you have started on the right note in the virtual world. One of the crucial roles in search engine rankings is played by domain names related to keywords that focus on your business and website. It definitely goes a long way in attracting target audience, getting increased conversions and generating business.

The process of choosing the right domain name needs careful considerations and deliberations, when you are thinking of starting a new website. And this is especially important if search engine optimization is going to be the main tool for directing traffic to your website. A SEO friendly domain name is one of the key factors that contribute to the success of the website. Therefore, you have to keep in mind the objective of your website and accordingly choose targeted keywords that you are planning to use to get top search engine rankings for your site. Inserting the main keywords of your business into the URL is a good idea. This is because not only is your website theme kept same throughout but Google, too, looks favorably on it.

Now, let us see what the different factors are that can be adopted to make a SEO friendly domain name.

Keywords in the Domain Name

Keywords play the role of a catalyst in a domain name. Though the keywords themselves do not constitute the entire process of SEO but they definitely contribute in making the entire procedure happen at a much faster rate.

Stick with the “.com”

The top level domain or TLD remains the most popular extension for a domain name. A .com domain definitely allows credibility boost. It is the most widely accepted extension. Of course, we can’t neglect that there are a lot of successful websites that end with a “.net”, “.uk”, or a “.biz”, but at the same time a .com extension by far is the most recalled one. If your business happens to be a new one, do you really want your customers to forget all about you just because they recalled to type in a “.com” instead of your “.edu”, and as a result couldn’t go back to your site! However, there are certain exceptions to this rule, especially if your business is geographically constrained and targets only local customers, in that case a “.au” will work as well.

Shorter and Catchier

It is best to have a domain name that is short and catchy. It is easier for visitors to recall and remember these. And you definitely don’t want a website that loses out on traffic because the domain name is too long, tricky or complicated to remember. Short names can also be typed more easily. Ensure that your domain name is easy to remember and easy to type.

No Hyphens or Numbers

Use of hyphenated or numbered domain names should be avoided. This is because it creates complications. Most often than not such domain names are forgotten easily, because it can’t be recalled where exactly the hyphen or the number has to be placed. You may end up losing your customers to other similar named websites, who do not use a hyphen or a number. And more often than not, hyphenated domain names sound like cheap substitutes of the real thing.

Type-In Traffic

This is when someone simply arrives at a particular website by just typing what they are searching for in their URL bar, and add a “.com” at the end. And a lot of people actually do that! Therefore, if you can choose a domain name that has an exact match keyword then you have better chances of receiving traffic. Also these kinds of domain names have better SEO benefits going for them.

Choosing a domain name that is SEO friendly can work wonders for your business by attracting lots of visitors to your website. With a heavy inflow of traffic, there are better chances of increases in conversion. All this definitely contributes in making your business a success.

In recent years the concept of SEO has gained a lot of importance. The terms White Hat SEO and Black Hat SEO have emerged universally as a marketing strategy to increase a website’s relevancy and ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs). The SEO industry uses various techniques which can be ethical or unethical depending on the approach SEO professionals wish to adopt for optimizing pages.

White Hat SEO uses strategies which are considered ethically correct and legitimate by SEO’s as well as search engines while spidering a site. It would be best to use this tactic as a means of achieving top ranking in the search results and also boosting real time traffic to your website. These tactics will not lead to penalties which are generally imposed when Black Hat SEO is used and even though it may take some amount of time to reap the rewards of the White Hat SEO process, it will surely bring in promising results in terms of high rakings and also rank stability.

The whole idea behind White Hat SEO is to ensure that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see. The content that you would find on the webpage would not be solely for the search engine but also keeping the visitor in mind.

White Hat SEO Tactics:

Internal Linking

A simple way to hinder a good website ranking on the search engine is by making it tough for the search engines to spider and index pages. Several websites may use scripts to provide fancy drop down navigation and so on but unfortunately these scripts will not be crawled and indexed by the search engine bots. They will go unnoticed by the search engine spiders since they are mainly text driven and are oblivious to images, scripts, frames, directories, etc.

Creating a site with scripts and fancy navigations may enhance the look of your website; however, it will prevent the spidering of your site. Therefore, it is essential to add text links at the bottom of your landing page linking to your most important internal pages including the sitemap.

Reciprocal Linking

Building reciprocal links is another White Hat SEO technique where you exchange links with other sites to get additional incoming links to your website. However, you must remember the following points when linking to other sites:

1. Link to sites that are relevant to yours

2. Consider linking to sites which have content that will appeal to and interest your visitors

3. Link to sites that have keywords you wish to target

Since this process is tedious and time consuming, avoid randomly linking to any site that you come across. This will not only lead to wastage of time and effort but also not bring in any results in terms of achieving a high search engine ranking.

Creating Content

This is an important part of the SEO process where compelling text has to be created that will attract more visitors to your site and add more value to your web pages. Creating a content rich website will not only boost visitor traffic to your site but will also lead to better recognition and indexing of your pages. Also, there would be many webmasters out there who would want to link to your site if they find it to be a good resource on their subject. Though content creation may take a lot of time, it will be worth the time and effort in the future.

Optimizing Your Website

This is another White Hat SEO technique which has gained a lot of popularity in recent times. Optimizing your site to improve its layout, structure, presentation, and content can help you gain better visibility and exposure.

Search engine optimization is the activity of improving the volume and quality of real time traffic to web pages or whole sites from search engines through natural search results for targeted keywords. Most often a website that gets a higher position or ranking in the search results is the one which the searchers will visit more frequently. Therefore, it is important that a site is optimized to get real time traffic the right way to make it more search-engine friendly and get a higher rank in the search results.

Though SEO helps in boosting real time traffic to a website, it should not be considered as the marketing of the site. It may be easy for one to pay and appear in the paid search results for a set of keywords, however, the concept behind the SEO technique is to get the topmost ranking without paying since your site is relevant to the search query entered by the user.

The amount of time that can be spent on optimizing a website to get real time traffic can range from a few minutes to a long term activity. If your product or service is such that the keywords used are uncommon, then some general SEO would be sufficient to get a top rating. However, if your product or service industry is competitive or is in a saturated market, then it is important to dedicate considerable amount of time and effort for SEO. Even if one decides on simple SEO solutions, it is necessary to understand how search engine algorithms work and which items are crucial in SEO to get real time traffic.

The marketing approach that SEO adopts for increasing a site’s relevance is consideration of how search engines work and what searches are performed by users. The SEO process attempts to concentrate its efforts on a site’s coding, presentation, structuring, and also resolving issues that prevent search engine indexing program from spidering a website entirely.

Additionally, SEO efforts also include inserting unique content to web pages to make it more attractive to users and also to ensure that the search engine robots can easily index the content. Optimizing a site to get real time traffic can either be done by in house personnel or outsourced to professional optimizers who carry out SEO projects as a stand-alone service, like us – SEO Traffic Spider.

SEO tactics can be varied to achieve top ranking in search results. These fall into three categories (White-Hat SEO, Grey-Hat SEO, and Black-Hat SEO) depending on legitimacy and ethics.

White Hat SEO uses strategies which are considered ethically correct and legitimate by SEO’s as well as search engines while spidering a site. It would be best to use this tactic as a means of achieving top ranking in the search results for real time traffic. These tactics will not lead to penalties which are generally imposed when Black Hat SEO is used and even though it may take some amount of time to reap the rewards of this process, it will surely bring in promising results in terms of high rakings.

Grey Hat SEO uses tactics which may be considered legitimate if they are used correctly. However, these have been subjected to misuse by unethical SEO’s and webmasters. It is possible that your website will not get penalized or banned for using this strategy and it may be necessary to use this process at times, however, webmasters are careful in the use of these tactics. This is because search engines may penalize tactics that are subjected to abuse even though they are used in legitimate forms.

Black Hat SEO employs techniques that are considered illegitimate and ethically incorrect and which have been or will surely be penalized and cause your website to be banned by search engines. Since Black Hat SEO is subject to abuse widely because it tends to harm search engine user experience, it is highly recommended to avoid using it as a means of attaining high ranking.