Part 1: Selecting Your Domain Name
We have all heard about the explosive growth of the
Internet but once we are confronted with the real facts, this growth almost
seems like a miracle. The Internet continues to grow at an annual rate of more
than 18% and now has one billion users on all continents.
The number is expected
to double to two billion by 2020. One of the catalysts that has fueled this
unbridled growth is the Internet’s unparalleled ability to provide a level
playing field for one and all to pursue the radiant dream of success and financial prosperity. The Internet knows no
religious, economic or ethnic distinctions and treats every dreamer that dares
to carve a niche in cyber space with an equal amount and level of impartiality.
As we stand at the multiple crossroads of Internet and online commerce, we are
sure to notice how important considerations such as the way in which web sites
should be optimized for the search engines can make the difference between a run
away success on the Internet and simply a damp online squib.
Web Hosting and White Hat SEO
Among the more than a hundred factors that determine how
the major search engines rank your web site on search engine result pages, the
environment in which your site is hosted by a
web hosting company is one of the most important. This is perhaps the most
under-estimated factor when web sites are prepped for search engine spiders to
generate front page rankings on search engine result pages (SERPs). There is
more to healthy and ethical search engine positioning than garden variety link
building and keyword research-- a premise that can be easily substantiated
through carefully articulated analysis and systematic execution. Implement most
if not all of the considerations outlined here and you will notice how your web
site quickly sky-rockets to a coveted position on the result pages of Google,
Yahoo and MSN.
Before you Sign the Web Hosting Dotted Line
Before you finalize the
web hosting company to which you will eventually assign the crucial
responsibility to manage the hosting of your web site, there is a short check
list you should run through:
·
Selecting the right domain name…
Did you know that the top level domain name (TLD) you
choose for your web site determines, in part, your search engine ranking? This
isn’t a myth because all you need to do in order to verify this hypothesis is to
pick any established and competitive keyword and enter it into a major search
engine such as Google or Yahoo and then sit back to watch the result pages. You
will quickly notice a pattern emerge. Many of the top level domain names such as
.com, .net and .org which use part or all of the keywords in their domain names
will be reflected. This equation also holds true for web pages—the pages that
are linked from either the home page or one of the more important pages. Here is
an example:
Keyword: top jobs
Result on the SERP:
http://www.getatopjob.com
Web page result: http://jobfair.com/top_jobs_in_your_city.htm
The presence of search terms and search phrases in the
domain name and its accompanying web pages is no coincidence. They are often
expertly chosen by
SEO professionals after meticulously pursuing search engine keyword research
using high energy paid keyword research tools such as
Keyword Country.
The order in which search terms and phrases appear in
the domain name or the name of a web page also impacts page rank and position.
For instance, if “cheap
secured loans” is the operational key phrase,
http://www.getcheapsecuredloans.com will generate more mileage for you than
cheapgetsecuredloans.com. Equally important is the “add on word” When you add a
relevant term such as an action or transitive verb such as “get” the domain name
becomes even more powerful. Hence,
http://getcheapsecuredloans.com will generate a higher ranking for you than
cheapsecuredloans.com all else being equal.
Search engine spiders, search bots and indexers have
become intelligent enough to be able to parse the domain name and match it up
with their hyper indexes. Therefore, it is no longer necessary or meaningful for
you to
register top level domain names with dashes or hyphen. It is also a good
idea to register domain names with a .com extension. Acquire a domain name with
a .net extension only if a .com is not available. The Search engine love affair
with the first generation top level domain names such as .com, .net or .org
isn’t a thing of the past yet and the second generation top level domain names
such as .mobi and .biz still have ways to go. You can always read my earlier
article on domain names
Choosing a SEO friendly Domain Name, or
Are Domain Names with Hyphens and Dashes SEO Unfriendly. The same holds true
for domain names with country-specific extensions such as .e for Germany and .ru
for Russia. Everything else being equal, as long as a search result with a .com
or .net is available for the major search engines to display in their results, a
country-specific domain name may not get preference on the global search (google.com),
but will result well in the country specific searches (google.co.in) Personal
experience and what might be best described as intuitive and unscientific
research has also led us to believe that optimized web pages housed in
sub-domains, too don’t make it to the list. If you have a set of landing pages
for instance which must be indexed preferentially, try not to house them under a
sub-domain. It is well worth your while to invest less then seven US dollars in
an independent, search engine friendly domain name and put them out for the
major search engines such as Yahoo and MSN to index them.
It is important, therefore, that you plan your domain
naming strategy carefully first before registering a domain name because as
Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth would say “what is done cannot be undone!
·
Who on Earth is Whois…
Before we tell you who “Whois” is, its relevance to SEO
strategy and how it is related to the major search engines, we need to take a
moment and tell you about localized and geo-targeted search. Over the past few
months, all the major search engines have been gradually, steadily but surely
moving toward serving up more relevant results by displaying local search
results. For instance, if you were planning to send your son or daughter to a
tennis academy in your city, type “tennis school” or “tennis classes” into
Google’s search box and you will notice that many of the results displayed will
link you to tennis academies in your immediate area. This intuitive ability to
connect you with your local community is not the exception but the rule and as
time passes, more and more search results will display local establishments in
your area that offer the product or service you seek. As an icing on the
proverbial SER cake, millions of results are also being indexed to street map,
directions and other logistics data through Map Quest, Google Maps and other
services.
Google and possibly the other major search engines seem
to have established a referencing system which accesses the Whois records of a
domain name. A Whois record contains complete information about your domain name
including your geographical location. This is the same referencing technology
currently being used by a large number of web analytics programs such as HitBox,
SAS and ClickTracks. A sample record from Whois which you can access by visiting
http://whois.org looks like this:
·
Go Windows or Linux…
This is most certainly the million dollar question in
any
web hosting-SEO debate. Each platform has its own distinct advantages and
flaws and this is perhaps an inappropriate forum to discuss this. The search
engine spiders have, in effect, been impartial in this matter. Web sites hosted
on both platforms are uniformly indexed by the major search engines continuously
round the clock. The key is to use search engine friendly code, provide HTML
meta tags liberally and craft a SEO friendly search map where pages are linked
mostly from text links. The
web hosting company should provide your web site with sufficient bandwidth
with a 99.9% up time. Windows-based hosting servers have to be shut down at
least once a month if not more for routine maintenance and Microsoft update
installations and Heaven forbid that the search engine spider comes looking for
your site at that time. The more state-of-the-art your hosting company’s system
resources are, the better your site’s performance. Your minimum server
configuration should be:
Hosting System featuring Intel Pentium 4 with Quad
Processors and at least 1 GB RAM and 24X7 power backup
Even if your web site is on a
shared hosting platform, there is no distinct disadvantage. The key is to
ensure that the
web hosting hardware is well maintained and all logs are preserved for
administrative access.
About the Author
Naveen Kapur is the CEO of
Caba Innovatives, a New Delhi-based
multimedia and internet consulting firm and an
Multimedia Animation Internet Institute in India in India
In Part II of this series we will further explore the
often misunderstood relationship between web hosting and search engine
optimization and tell you why it is important to have a clean DNS record and why
using a dedicated IP address makes perfect sense from a SEO perspective.
|
