Getting more out of your domain and URL - Best Practise

May 20th, 2008

There are a lot of rumours that float round the internet as to what and what not to do. However in my opinion, it is surprising how many people make a pigs ear out of the whole process, either by incorrectly identifying their core source of traffic, and subsequently choosing the wrong approach or vice versa. So we here at E-Gain thought we would put together a quick overview of getting an oft misused part of your online marketing strategy.

Keep it fit for purpose

The amount of times clients have approached us saying “this company has offered me super-injury-lawyers-in-england.com - and says it is very good for SEO and wants £x for it”.  Whilst there is no doubting that domain names do have an effect on SEO, however at the end of the day, the effectiveness of such urls are two fold

• How much direct traffic do you have - having such a long winded domain can often be difficult to type in, and provide (by word of mouth) to your clients (particularly if you use hyphens - believe me - we know - and possibly should have listened to our own advice). You are therefore likely to either lose traffic to your site by mistyped domains, or worse still lose traffic to direct competitors by them exploiting loopholes in your online marketing strategy.
• Its only as good as the way it is implemented. Correct setup of domains, minimising duplicate content and ensuring a well structured SEO campaign are still required in order to make your website work as hard as it can from an Search perspective.

To me so many people get this wrong - focussing too much on the domain aspect of SEO, and forget ultimately who uses the sites. At the end of the day, SEO is part of your marketing strategy. The likelihood is a high proportion of users will rely on a multitude of channels to find your site, whether that be direct, search or email before buying your service or product, so you really need to be thinking from a cohesive marketing perspective rather than just a one-dimensional focus

KISS - Keep it simple stupid.

An obvious URL is a good URL. Having an easy URL to remember can be worth its weight in gold. Just look at all the big online brands - Yahoo, Dell, Google, Facebook. All have one thing in common, all have a simple, easy to remember domain. Whilst wat.com may sounds funky, chances are people aren’t going to type your ’special spelling’ in as their first attempt, and thus you face the same potential dilemmas as you would mentioned above. At the end of the day, URL’s get shared, pasted and passed on by word of mouth, so keep it relevant and it simple

Static vs Dynamic

There is no doubting that search engines DO treat static URL’s better than dynamic ones, and it is worth bearing this in mind when it comes to the structure and architecture of your website. Further to this - no one likes typing in ‘&’, ‘?’ or ‘=’ into their page names. With the development and awareness these days, there really is no reason as to why you can’t use some form of URL rewriting to make your pages more URL friendly.

Words or numbers - which is better

There is no doubting again, that page naming plays a part in the algorithm - however small, and for this reason it is worth considering your page naming convention right from the development and planning stage of your website. This is something I find many people miss out during their web build and then have to retro fit it on deployment when they decide their traffic volumes aren’t what they expected.

Many dynamic sites us keys in order to identify particular records (our glossary for example - http://www.e-gain.co.uk/online_marketing/news_articles/Press%20Releases/4), however given a well structured database and site hierarchy there is no reason why you shouldn’t be able to use text based matches or alternatively a mixture of both (ie www.product.com/123/blue-widget.html)

Thorough keyword and keyword mapping also play an important part here. By ensuring your page naming convention is tied into a well structure keyword/page mapping plan, can pay handsome dividends when it comes to your SEO results 

Familiarity does not breed contempt 

If your site uses a single format throughout the site, don’t break with tradition on one section and differ it from the rest. I would suggest this comparison is carried through your whole online planning and development, as I personally would advise any clients to ensure familiarity with browsers, in order to ensure consistency and ease of navigation. I would suggest the same rings true for your domain and URL structure.

Re-inventing the wheel in situations where reliance on convention makes everyone’s tasks easier doesn’t really make sense.

Hyphens, dashes, pluses - whats best? 

It is often debated as to what is best from an SEO perspective, but to all intents and purposes, and maybe Google may be interested to provide their thoughts on this, they are probably going to be used to provide a benchmark as to where words stop - so whether it is a hyphen or underscore I would suggest is irrelevant. This may go against most peoples thoughts however from a simple PHP programming perspective the following could be used to replace a “-” or “_” with a ” ” thus making it a seperate phrase, and as you will see - none has priority.

preg_replace(”![_\-\+]!”,” “,$pagename);

However what I would add, make sure you use what Google suggest. Underscores and hyphens are known to work - for goodness sake do not seperate phrases by use of anything else (* for example)

Streamline your folders

I would suggest any excess backage is reduced from your domain hierarchy (and add to this words or characters for that matter of fact).  Less is more from an SEO perspective, and I would suggest the more streamlined your architecture here, the better for your SEO.

As Rand Fiskin stated on the SEOMoz article covering a similar topic - “The extra fabric is useless and will reduce his likelihood of impressing potential mates.”

There can only be one

I have come across a number of sites recently where the same page is presented however from a domain perspective presented as completely seperate pages (a well known cinema site for example). THis not only presents potential duplicate content issues, however from a SEO perspective, it dilutes the linkage potential of a particular page. The cinema above for example references movie pages individually as well as via local references. ie movie/movie1 and location/x/movie/movie1. Centralising movie pages not only benefits internal linkage, but also gives external linkage a centralised place to link to.

To conclude

It is potentially one of the easiest parts to your SEO strategy particularly during the early parts of a web build, however it is suprising just how many people don’t give the domain structure as much though as the design and content of the website.

It is worth adding, doing this at the beginning is time well spent, and you will save yourselves a packet having to talk to experts like me down the line.

Entry Filed under: SEO