If you haven’t registered a domain name for a new website that you are planning then give it some thought. Although you should be spending time and effort building inbound links to your site you will find that you may naturally attract links without asking for them. The majority of people who link to you without asking will use your web address whether it’s an internal page or your home page.
This is where good domain name planning now will pay massive dividends in the future. Let me explain…..
You can select a domain name that contains your keywords. Your keywords will therefore be in any link you didn’t ask to get and act as anchor text. Use dashes in your domain names sparingly – one at most – otherwise you run the risk of having search engines believing you are trying to manipulate them. They don’t like that and you may be penalised.
Examples of keyword rich domains are:
http://www.toplawfirms.co.uk/
http://www.plasterboardrecycling.co.uk/
Similarly, give some thought to the file names you give your pages. The file name is the web address of a particular page eg:
www.nottinghamhousecleaners.co.uk/carpetcleaning
If someone gave a link to your web site from theirs using the file name above then you can see it would be rammed full of juicy keywords. The clickable text in a link is vitally important to search engines and it’s a smart idea to get your keywords in the links coming in to your site. The search engine’s spiders will love to see this structure which makes it clear to them what the particular page is all about.
This also brings us neatly to the topic of domain name ageing.
You probably won’t achieve much in the way of search engine results for three to six months if you launch a brand new site on a brand new domain. In our experience if you do achieve any rankings in search engines in the first few months it normally won’t be for the hottest keyphrases you have optimised your web site for. This can be infuriating. But don’t despair – there is a painless way around this situation.
The solution is to register a domain and develop a simple one page site well in advance of your intended launch date. If you have a project in mind then register the domain and build a one page mini site. It doesn’t have to be a work of art. It needn’t contain boatloads of copy but you should include your keywords in the copy and page title.
The next step is to let search engines know about the site. To do this create a link from a site you know is frequently spidered and point the link at your mini -site pointed at it.
This will let the search engines know about the domain and your site – by the time you launch, your domain will be well aged, your site will have been crawled by spiders a few times and you will minimise the time period you are viewed with suspicion. It’s all about planning.
Remember – we aren’t trying to trick search engines – we’re trying to make it obvious to them what our web pages are all about.
