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What's In a Name - Choosing URLs for Search Engine Optimization
It is a source of great frustration to web marketing strategists and search engine optimization experts that two of the most important factors in website success are often determined without specialist help.
Viral marketing, article distribution and link building activities all have less value if your URL is not relevant to your services, and if customers can't access your site quickly, or at all. We look at the considerations that should come first in any internet marketing activity, from building a main site to throwing up a landing page.
A site's URL is one of the main indicators to Google that it is relevant for particular customer searches. If you can use one of your main keywords in your site title, half the search engine optimization battle is won already. Many companies prefer the professionalism of having their company name in their URL.
This is not necessarily an inferior choice, however your search engine marketing efforts can be helped along by including a combination of your company name and a description of your services in the title.
When creating a landing page for a specific internet marketing campaign, there are several different considerations in URL choice. You may need several different URLs, all redirecting to the same landing page, for web analytics purposes.
Including your target's name in the URL can be extremely effective in some campaigns, but a dismal failure in others. If you are publishing the URL in hard copy anywhere, it may need to be hand-typed. Prime consideration should be given to length in this case. Pay attention to double letters in URLs that will need to be hand-typed, as these are one of the leading sources of typographical errors If it will need to be cut-and-pasted from another document, length is a consideration also.
While the domain extension you use is not as important to your search engine optimization efforts as the main part of your URL, it certainly makes an impact on your traffic figures. Your internet marketing campaigns may have a significant proportion of your interested audience not reaching your site, simply because they assume you will have a .com extension, when you have chosen .net.
The same applies for region-specific URLs. They are seen by many customers as more trustworthy than simple .coms, however not owning the related .com site also could be costing you dozens of times what you would have paid for the domain registration in lost business.
While using SMS-style contractions in website domains does give a site a certain personality, it can also impede your web marketing strategy. Using contractions like 'u' instead of 'you', '4' instead of 'for', and '2' instead of 'to' or 'too' can result in lost traffic, when a 404 message pops up instead of your website when customers type in the entire word.
This type of URLs is also increasingly used by disreputable internet businesses, and the perception can cling to your business also, negating your viral marketing and general internet marketing efforts.
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