How important are domain for Search Engine Rankings?

The keyword in your domain name debate….

Will adding your keyword to the URL help your chances with rankings?

The short answer is yes. Understand that the bots that crawl your website are trying to understand what your site is about. The URL will be their first clue. There is a lot of discussion over whether a keyword based URL is really that important and my answer has always been….

All things considered equal (which is rarely the case), The webmaster who uses the name of the keyword in their URL will almost always outrank someone who is using a generic domain name.

The reason why is actually quite simple…..Like I said earlier, the search bot is looking to categorize your site. The first thing it scans is….your URL. Simply put, the URL can be the first clue it gets.

On-page optimization is simply all the stuff that influences the search engines on your site.

I am sure you have heard all this mumbo jumbo about meta tag this and header tag that but let me deduce on-page optimization into its simplest form.

The reason why you want to do on-page optimization is because you want to give the google bot a way to say….”hey, this site is about ___________”.

That is it. If you can get the google bot to accurately categorize your site before it even gets to your content then it is mission accomplished. If not, then you aren’t optimized well enough.

There are only 2 things that will influence the google bots as far as on-page optimization is concerned…..

The actual layout of your site
The articles, post, content of your site

That’s it. If you can get both of these right in the eyes of the search engines, then you will outrank the majority of sites out there in whatever niche you choose. I am not saying all the sites but getting both of these factors right could put you on the 70^th page even for a competitive term coming right out of the gate, without inbound links. And starting out at page 70 is much better than starting out at page 1,000.

In a second, I will show you a simple plan that will have you getting ranked quickly for your “long tail keywords”. The plan is to keyword snipe your way to the top. And since we are “keyword sniping” using low competitive long tails, the dogpile is not near as high to get to the top.

The reason behind this is fairly simple and to understand this, we will have to take a look at a website that would be the most ideal in terms of how the Search Engine bots work.

A google bot will scan your page starting at the top left….then go down the left column…back up to the top and down the next column…and so on and so forth until it reaches the bottom right of the page.

So taking a look at the above statement, where does this leave those websites who want a left hand column? Most of these have “HOME” in their navigation. Who wants to be ranked for HOME? Do you want the google bot to determine that your site is about “home” and rank your site for home? I wouldn’t.

In Ideal settings, the search engine bot will read the site as follows….

Your URL
The Title of your Website
The description of your Website
The actual “post” title of the page..
Content Headers
Sub content headers
The actual content….(with LSI and your keywords in them)

Now, look at that for a second and let it register with ya. I can pretty much guarantee you that if you can take a look at your current site and it wouldn’t be optimized for the search bots.

Here is a link to see what the search engine spiders see: http://seoanalytic.com/tools/bot_view/

If you aren’t optimizing for the google bots, (or whatever search engine you are hoping to rank for), then your on page optimization will suck coming out of the gate…scratch that…your onpage optimization will be like most of the other blogs/websites you see online.

IF you can optimize your website in a way where the search engine bots can determine exactly what your site is about, then you wil leapfrog over thousands and hundreds of thousands of sites coming out of the gate.

I can’t reiterate this enough. What this means is that if you are using wordpress plug-ins (recent posts, comments, ect..) in the header or before your content, then you aren’t doing yourself any favors. You are, in effect, throwing in interruptions as far as the SE spider is concerned.

If the search engine spider gets distracted by links (“home” or any common links that you may find), then you aren’t doing yourself favors.

IF the search engine bot can’t ascertain exactly what your site is about (keywords) by the time it reaches your content, then you are doing something wrong.

Getting the bots to “categorize” you should be your numero uno motive when it comes to on page optimization. If you can do that, you are way ahead of most of the websites and blogs out there that are your competitors.

Now, let’s take a look at the different parts of on page optimization….

The URL

Your domain name is the first thing that a spider will see. Like I said before, there is a a lot of debate over whether a domain name is important or not. Once again, its importance may be negligible but if you are to believe that the search engine bots are trying to categorize your website, then the domain could be its first clue.

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How important are domain for Search Engine Rankings?

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