Tips for Choosing the Right Domain Name for Your Small Business Website
Domain Name is the face of your business and your address on the internet. Choosing the right domain name is important and also to choose the domain that will also help you to get a better SEO rank. When you are running a business, a strong online presence is very important to move your business to the next level and SEO is one important factor that helps you to achieve that. The impact that a domain name does to your SEO rankings has changed a lot in the last couple of years, so choosing a domain name should be done carefully and after considering a lot of factors, that am going to explain later in the article. So let’s see the factors that need to be considered before choosing a domain name.
Never Choose Exact Match Domains (EMD)
Exact Match domains were the hot keywords in SEO strategy a few years back, where every website was named as exact match keywords related to their business. For ex, if your business is all about New York Car Rentals, then choosing an Exact Match Domain Name (EMD) like www.newyorkcarrentals.com was a great strategy. And anyone searching for New York Car rentals, your domain name will appear on top of the rankings, so all you need is to just spend a couple of bucks to buy and EMD and you are right on top of Google Search Engine rankings without worrying about quality content, back links or any SEO strategy. After a lot of complaints has been made with google, it changed its algorithm with an update called exact match domain update, where it would not rank domains based on EMD’s, but with other factors including quality content, back links and better organic SEO strategies.
Choose Your Domain Name Extension Wisely
Another important factor that affects your rankings is your domain name extension. If your business deals with only local customers or products, then you should always think about going for country based domain names like .us, .uk or .in, as these country domains rank higher in local results than other domain name extensions.
Is Your Domain Name Memorable?
The shorter the domain name, the more the people can remember it easily. According to many analysis made by SEO experts, a domain should be no longer than 15 characters. Most of the social media platforms like Facebook allow only a maximum of 15 characters for displaying your domain names and search engines too have limited to displaying URL’s within 15 characters only. So if you choose more than 15 characters, then your website URL will not be properly displayed in search engine rankings.
Characters Used in Your Domain Name
Yes, the characters you choose to represent your domain name also has some effect in increasing or decreasing your search engine rankings. You are free to use all kinds of alphabets, numerals or special characters while choosing a domain name. But when you choose any special characters, your domain name will become less visible when compared to domain name with alphabets and numbers.
Buying a Domain Name from Others?
If you are buying a domain name, you should be very careful and do a complete check for the domain history. If the domain has been blacklisted by the search engines, then it would be of no use buying the domain and wasting your money.