Lesson (18): Domain Name, File Names and Extensions

Your domain name, the URLs of your pages and your title tag are some of the influential factors for your search engine rankings. Keeping this knowledge in mind, you can have advantage over your competitors in a race towards high search engine rankings.

Keywords in domain names and file names

There’s a widespread opinion that solely stuffing URLs with keywords will lead to really good rankings. This was once the case however not so much anymore, as search engines take many more factors into account when ranking Web pages. That being said, having your keyword in your domain name and page URLs will be a good bonus, though not a decisive factor.

A domain name like http://www.furniture-online.com will generally get ranked higher than http://www.companyname.com, assuming that they had identical keywords and page content. Thus, the conclusion is that you should try to use a domain name which contains your keywords (those you’ve found during your preliminary research).

One more word in favor of keyword-aware domain names: when a site links to you using your domain name as the anchor text, this link gives you more weight on the search engines for the key phrase used in the link anchor text. Directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo often won’t let you specify the anchor text of your link – they’ll use the site’s name. That’s where a keyword-rich domain name really comes in handy.

There are certain drawbacks and objections to this method, for example: three or more words in the domain name look too unprofessional, or you have already registered a domain name without keywords in it and it’s too late to change the things.

The optimal workarounds would be as follows:

• Try to get an additional domain name which contains your keywords. Then, redirect it to your main website. (Later in this course we will deal with the correct way to organize the redirects).
• Use keywords in the URLs of your new pages, e.g. http://www.companyname.com/web-development-services.html. Remember, search engines rank pages, not sites.
• If you already have a fairly large website, you might start looking for a solution to rename all your pages and keep the link structure working. Adobe Dreamweaver (created by Macromedia) offers a solution with its “Change links sitewide” feature. Web CEO’s built-in HTML Editor also has a Find-and-Replace function which you may apply for multiple pages of your site to rebuild the links.

Keyword separators

In order to properly populate URLs with keywords, you need to remember the following. First, search engines cannot separate keywords from one another if they are written together in one word (except in some cases like Yahoo). So a domain name like freeicecream.com is of little use. However, free-ice-cream.com does work.

When creating URLs with a phrase, use a hyphen (-) which is recognized by all search engines, e.g. free-ice-cream.com. If you have no possibility to choose a more SEO-friendly domain, you can consider using hyphen-separated keywords in names of your pages, e.g. http://www.companyname.com/web-development-services.html.

Being the best word separator, hyphen is followed by underscore (_) which is recognized by some search engines. Underscore is followed by plus (+) and nothing.

Important: Yahoo! can only find a keyword if it stands at the beginning of a word, so with the example of freeicecream it will actually find only the word “free” but not “ice-cream”. So if you’re targeting “free ice cream”, the domain name without the hyphens will not help.

Thus, free-ice-cream.com will be found for your keywords by all search engines, so separating your keywords with the hyphen is definitely the best solution.

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