Does your domain name have an impact on your search rankings? Yes, but not in the way you may initially think. Domain names and URL’s impact search engine optimization is one of the most misunderstood parts of SEO. The better understand, and benefit from this, you need to understand not just if it has an impact, but how.

So, how do domain names and URL’s affect SEO? The answer lays in the way people link to your site. For example, one of our clients is Hotels.com. Hotels.com currently enjoys the top positions in just about every search engine for the term “hotels”. I’m certain that doesn’t surprise anyone reading this. The fact that their domain name is Hotels does play a factor. But more importantly, the fact that Hotels.com, and it’s parent company Expedia, is a publicly traded company, and has one of the biggest marketing budgets in the travel industry has an even greater impact. You see, when newspapers write about Hotels.com, and people on blogs mention them, they do so inherently with the anchor text “Hotels”.

Now let’s look at a client that has the same luxury of having a great search term domain, but not the same budget. Keep in mind, this is a USWeb client. CarInsurance.com. if you search for the term Car Insurance in Google, you’ll notice that Carinsurance.com is not the #1 result. That is currently Progressive, with the number two ranking going to Geico. Does this surprise anyone? These companies are well branded, large advertising budget companies that are known for being insurance providers. The fact that Carinsurance.com is on the first page has less to do with their name than the amount of work they have put into getting their site to rank for that term. In order for them to move any further up the page, they will have to bump Insweb.com, StateFarm.com, and AAA.com. Unless you have lives in a cave your entire life, you know those companies to be giant brands, with incredibly large ad budgets. Moving up in search rankings will not be an easy task. And their domain name has little to do with the results.

So, what do you do if you domain does not happen to be a popular search term? I think my favorite example of our strategy here is USWeb.com. Note, our name is USWeb, not online-marketing-firm.com. But, we rank number one for that term (as well as internet marketing firm, web marketing firm, interactive marketing firm, etc…). Allow me to let you in on a secret. Almost any site linking to the USWeb site is linking with the term “online marketing firm” in the title.

For example, go to www.usweb.com. Click on the About page. Note the URL:
http://www.usweb.com/online_marketing_firm/about_usweb.htm

The term “online marketing firm” is in 80% of the URL’s on the site. So, when people link to a subpage on our site, they are linking to us with the term online marketing firm inherently in the link. The same way they would if the term was our domain name.

This is a pretty valuable tip. If you build out your URL schema in this way, you will be surprise what will happen with your rankings for that term. Of course you also have to get sites to link to you.

What if you have a database driven site that spits out ugly URL’s? There are solutions for this like mod_rewrite, or ISAPI rewrite. Ask you webmaster about these solutions.

For more information about how to create more solid URL’s, contact USWeb directly.

seo

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 8th, 2006 at 10:47 amand is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.