What is the most important marketing decision when creating an online business?
It’s your domain name, the URL of your business. www.Your Domain Name.com.
In an ideal situation, your domain name should explain exactly what your business does. This is an essential part of how your domain will be ranked by a search engine. In fact, most search engines consider your domain name as the highest ranking element of your website.
Consider the acronym CSA. What is CSA? You would never know by only reading the acronym. It happens to be a consumer review website, where you can post reviews about good and bad customer service for U.S. businesses. People are not going to search for a business or terms they have never heard of, such as CSA. It’s best to have the most relevant keywords in the domain name, or search terms, that a prospective customer might enter into the search field of a web browser.
Now look at the domain www.CustomerServiceArmy.com. This is a domain name with relevant key words, which explain the focus of the business. It’s also what the acronym CSA stands for. A simple choice like a domain name becomes essential to the planning stages of any new online venture. If you want to be at the top of the search results on the biggest search engines, spend the time up front so people can find you!
Here’s another example of how search terms can help your website’s ranking. Let’s say that you live in Pasadena, CA, and you’re looking for a Flash designer. Try searching for the term “Pasadena Flash Design” on Google. PX Media appears on the first page of your search results. Now think about the domain name. You are probably thinking that www.pxmediainc.com doesn’t have the word “Flash” in it, yet it appears in the top search results but, you will see listings of other companies with the word “Flash” as part of their domain names. “Why”. This is a unique situation where PX Media has worked for years to get its website to rank on the first page, using may essential components of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
The 2nd most important is your page naming or URL structure.
Anything that is listed after the domain name extension (e.g. .com, or .net) is the path that your customer will follow to a particular page on your website. For example, look at the following web link: https://www.pxmediainc.com/flash_services_intros_presentations_seo/. This is another factor that will be considered in the overall website rank. Google will index the full URL of each page, which includes the domain name and the full page name. This is one reason that PX Media ranks as high as it does, because of its high individual page rankings. We user keywords throughout the page name and URL. This is a SEO trick we were using before most people knew what SEO was.
Search engines like Google use sophisticated robots or spiders to index each page of your website. You should aim to make each page of your website as important as the home page. For example, when someone searches for a particular keyword, Google will give them the most relevant and up-to-date individual web pages with those results. This could be any page of your website, where some might be weaker than others. This page may be the only thing that a prospective customer sees for your business. If it doesn’t grab their attention and evoke a call to action (calling you, or going to another page on your website), they may move on to a competitor’s website and never see your home page. Make each and every page relevant and most important. Give the user something to do. Never forget to have a CALL TO ACTION on every page.
SEO has greatly evolved over the past five years and continues to change as each search engine changes their website ranking guidelines. Besides your domain name, another way to improve your website rank is to use two or more domain names. However, Google, or the largest search engine, only ranks the main domain name. You can use one domain name for ranking purposes, while another domain can be used for marketing purposes. For example, you can redirect a second domain name to the main domain to help boost your total website traffic. or use a simplified domain so that your clients don’t need to spell out your full SEO domain.
PX Media prides itself on its SEO knowledge and takes a pro-active stance on following the latest SEO trends and methodologies. Give us a call today and learn how PX Media can help your business get to the top of the search results!
by: Douglas Goddard.
