For any new business in today’s world, a website is vital to gaining new customers, and with every new website comes search engine optimisation (SEO) which is equally important. If your website is not properly optimised for search engines, then you could fall behind in the searches, no one will be able to find you and if no one can find you, this mean no sales, no customers, no business – and nobody wants that!

When it comes to SEO it is good to understand that there are many different search engines available, with Google, Bing, and Yahoo! being the top three, and all use different algorithms to determine which website ranks higher. However, while all use different algorithms, there are four main points that they consider, which are: content, site performance, authority, and user experience. These four items are important when optimising your website.

Once you know the basics, SEO is pretty simple to implement and we’ve touched upon it in a few of our previous blogs, such as here, here and here, but for the next few weeks we will be looking into SEO in more detail, showing you where to start and how to go about it.

In this week’s blog, we will look at the first step, which is picking a domain name for your website that is optimised for SEO.

Top Tips for a Domain Name

A domain name is very important for a brand, as important as the brand name itself! As the digital age is here to stay, brands need to make sure their domain name is easy so that visitors can remember it easier.

Below are a few handy tips to think about when deciding a new domain name:

1. Keep It Simple and Sweet (KISS!) – a simple domain name is more likely going to be remember as opposed to a complicated one, so it is best to keep it simple.
2. OR make it unique – on the flip of the first point, if you can think of a unique domain name, then that could be good as well as it will likely stand out. However, this is risky as unique ones can be misspelled.
3. Stick to the brand – you will probably notice that a lot of website names are just the brand name, such as Topshop is just topshop.com, or Adidas is Adidas.co.uk. This is a good idea as it keeps everything consistent, and helps build trust and credibility with the website visitors. A domain name that contains more keywords can be seen as spam, and this is not what you want for your brand.
4. Check your spelling! – make sure that the spelling in your domain name is spelt correctly, if it isn’t and someone tries to find you through a search engine, then your site may not appear high up.
5. Keywords? – Back in the day when search engines just came on the web scene, keywords were the main element that determined rank - people would put keywords in their domain to rank higher in search engines. However, in 2012 Google released a new update that prevented websites with all keywords to rank high. Now, this isn’t something stress over if you have a keyword in your domain name, as some situations you may need to, e.g. the domain you wanted is not available so adding a keyword can help, however just don’t make your domain all keywords.