SEO 101

It’s easy to think of a domain name as being one of the least important issues that impact your online business, however nothing could be farther from the truth. Having a good Domain name is extremely important to the online presence of a business.

To ensure that your business draws the maximum number of visitors it is imperative that your domain name is one that is memorable and makes an impact on the viewer. It should be easy to remember and straight forward. Avoid  complex and hard to pronounce words. Unless  the business name dictates it, try and avoid numerals and initials.

Try and limit your domain name to ten charcters and avoid exceeding twenty charcters at all costs. A great domain name is less than ten characters; a good domain name is less than twenty characters, going over twenty characters is less than acceptable.

As far as extensions go,  the .com domain name extension is the best by far, because it is the most widely used. The .net extension is the second best,  certain extensions are related to the kind of business, for example .gov is restricted to government related sites, while .org is typically used by not-for-profit organization and educational websites and .info extensions are generally used for informational websites.

I’s also important to use the right spelling and to avoid using symbols as viewers who misspel or who do not remember to ad the symbols may land on a competitors’ site.

A good domain name should be short and sweet and something that sticks in the viewers’ memory and draws them back to your site.

If you have pages that are doing well but some that are struggling, you think to yourself “What can I do to improve this page?” “Should I rewrite the content to make it fresh?”

In this case, rewriting content will not boost the page’s rankings, same goes for streaming an RSS feed onto a page to make the content of the page changing and fresh. Page rank is actually determined and merited by other factors such as inbound links and keyword placement in your page such as the title tag, headlines, etc.

But on the other hand, adding new content pages such as articles, resources or Blogs will increase traffic to your site. Frequently adding new content to your site will get the search engine spiders to crawl your site more regularly which will have your pages indexed faster.

Assuming that these new articles, resources or Blogs are written for the users and not just for Page Rank, it should be interesting enough that it attracts links on its own. And as long as these inbound links are quality and industry related links, the Page Rank of the page should be doing well without much maintenance.

All in all, frequently changing a page does lead to it being crawled more, meaning that the spiders can crawl to the new pages faster but one must do additional work such as linkbuilding and others to climb up the ladder in Page Rank.