Web Domains and the Search Engines

Whether you are buying a new domain to build pages and sell on, or whether you want to build it to generate income, you should give some thought to the use of search engine optimization in the development process.

If it is to make your site more valuable for a buyer to whom you can show steady traffic, or for the sake of your income (for which you also need good, and hopefully growing levels of traffic), search engine optimization is essential unless you are simply going to promote by pay-per-click.

Firstly, the myths. It is now taken for granted among the top SEO commentators that keywords in the domain name have no effect on the rankings of site pages. The time is past where search engine algorithms could be gamed by simple tricks like creating a domain called buy-my-cheap-discount-widgets.com. Any internal page names, if they incorporate keywords, may have some effect, though this too is doubtful.

So, when choosing a domain, you shouldn't sweat it when you find all the best domains are already taken. The search results will show the domain name to those searching, but that is the only possible benefit of keywords in a domain name.

The second myth is that using PPC on your new domain will get it picked up, get it spidered, and give it a push up in the search engine rankings. This has been shown to be totally wrong, and is the result of simple-minded hopeful thinking.

Get natural links from other sites, and the spiders will arrive naturally.

Have worthwhile and original content, and the search engines will learn to love you. If you can't create original content, look for someone who can. The old ways of collecting web content – scraping, lifting pages from directories, and all the gray and black hat techniques either don't work or will get you degraded in the results.

Don't worry about word density, just create your pages on a natural, single subject. In fact, do not be concerned about the search engines at all. Your goal should be to give something worthwhile to your real audience – your human visitors.

Validating your new site to W3C standard is a complete waste of your time. Google would have to exclude 99% of the web from its results if it used this as a ranking technique. Use the time saved to create new pages.

Don't pay to place your new domain in paid directories, or directories selling pagerank-based links. In the past this worked, but the search engine algorithms no longer give much weight to tricks like this. Just consider – a cash-rich company could buy its way to the top of the results for every phrase it wanted, if buying links actually worked: and it would just kill the value of the search engines to their users. This is precisely Google and the other engines want to prevent at all costs.

However, the search engine giants can make mistakes. Some websites, however fine and original their content and however numerous their incoming links, just never get anywhere in the search results. Get another domain and start over.