How to Choose SEO Friendly Domains?

Answer 1

It is not uncommon for people to stumble into easy pitfalls when they come to select domain names for their websites. Time and time again, people will select domains that are ultimately unfriendly and will not help their performance within the search engine rankings. So, it’s best to follow some simple guidelines when selecting your domain names, which are outlined below:

Step 1: Select a domain name with your main keyword in it. This will help the search engines pick it up more easily and will provide a starting point for you to add this keyword and its variations throughout the site.

Step 2. Avoid choosing a domain with characters in them, such as: &, %, # etc. These are considered unfriendly URLs, and they take up valuable character space which you should be using for your main keyword.

Step 3. Choose domain names with dashes instead of underscores. For example your domain name might be: www.your-name-is.com. This is read more easily by the search engines than domain names with underscores in them.

Step 4. If available, go for either a .com or .co.uk address, or if you are just targeting your country then select the appropriate suffix. These are generally more SEO-friendly than .net, .biz, etc. domain names.

Step 5. Don’t select very short domain names, i.e. http://www.mylife.com. As a rule of thumb, it’s better to go with longer-tailed keywords placed in the domain name than shorter keywords. This is because with a longer tailed domain name you’ll be picked up for perhaps more variations than you would do with a short keyword domain.

By spending some time on selecting an SEO friendly domain name, you can save yourself a lot of hard work later on in your campaign. It sets the foundation nicely, and gives you a starting point for other aspects of SEO work such as link building.