Last week I wrote that a search engine friendly website is not the same as a search engine optimized website. While that is a good article in and of itself, I’m using that as a jump off point to start a short series on the topic of building a search engine friendly website. Just in case you haven’t caught on yet, this is the first post in that series.
As a quick aside, and along these lines, over at search engine guide I made an argument for website validation as an important part of the optimization process. I don’t believe 100% validation makes a difference for rankings, but I outlined there why it is worth taking the time to do. At the very least it helps you identify search engine unfriendly problems.
For this series I figured we’d start at the top: the domain name. Many argue about the value of using keywords in the domain name and whether that will make any difference at all in the ranking algorithms. My opinion is if it does make a difference, it’s not much. But I also believe that the full process of optimization is largely about doing a whole lot of “not much”.
The smartest thing to do is make sure your business name uses your keywords. And no, I don’t mean you should name your business No Doc Home Mortgage Loans Company. But if you sell mortgages it makes sense to use mortgages in your name, being sure you can secure the domain name as well.
Since there is really not a lot you can do to “optimize” your domain or even make it search engine friendly so I’ll leave you with links to series of articles I’ve written previously on Securing a Marketing Rich Domain Name. That’ll give you some food for thought.
Intro (see link above)
Build Your Brand
Secure a .com
Don’t Hyphenate
Spell Words Properly
Type-In Traffic
Mispellings
Hyphenated Versions
YourDomainSucks.com
Use Proper Redirects