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Part 1: Selecting Your Domain Name
We have all heard about the explosive growth of the Internet but once we are confronted with the real facts, this growth almost seems like a miracle. The Internet continues to grow at an annual rate of more than 18% and now has one billion users on all continents.
The number is expected to double to two billion by 2020. One of the catalysts that has fueled this unbridled growth is the Internet's unparalleled ability to provide a level playing field for one and all to pursue the radiant dream of success and financial prosperity. The Internet knows no religious, economic or ethnic distinctions and treats every dreamer that dares to carve a niche in cyber space with an equal amount and level of impartiality. As we stand at the multiple crossroads of Internet and online commerce, we are sure to notice how important considerations such as the way in which web sites should be optimized for the search engines can make the difference between a run away success on the Internet and simply a damp online squib.
Web Hosting and White Hat SEO
Among the more than a hundred factors that determine how the major search engines rank your web site on search engine result pages, the environment in which your site is hosted by a web hosting company is one of the most important. This is perhaps the most under-estimated factor when web sites are prepped for search engine spiders to generate front page rankings on search engine result pages (SERPs). There is more to healthy and ethical search engine positioning than garden variety link building and keyword research-- a premise that can be easily substantiated through carefully articulated analysis and systematic execution. Implement most if not all of the considerations outlined here and you will notice how your web site quickly sky-rockets to a coveted position on the result pages of Google, Yahoo and MSN.
Before you Sign the Web Hosting Dotted Line
Before you finalize the web hosting company to which you will eventually assign the crucial responsibility to manage the hosting of your web site, there is a short check list you should run through:
Selecting the right domain name.
Did you know that the top level domain name (TLD) you choose for your web site determines, in part, your search engine ranking? This isn't a myth because all you need to do in order to verify this hypothesis is to pick any established and competitive keyword and enter it into a major search engine such as Google or Yahoo and then sit back to watch the result pages. You will quickly notice a pattern emerge. Many of the top level domain names such as .com, .net and .org which use part or all of the keywords in their domain names will be reflected. This equation also holds true for web pages, the pages that are linked from either the home page or one of the more important pages. Here is an example:
Keyword: top jobs
Result on the SERP: http://www.getatopjob.com
The presence of search terms and search phrases in the domain name and its accompanying web pages is no coincidence. They are often expertly chosen by SEO professionals after meticulously pursuing search engine keyword research using high energy paid keyword research tools such as Keyword Discovery.
The order in which search terms and phrases appear in the domain name or the name of a web page also impacts page rank and position. For instance, if "cheap secured loans" is the operational key phrase, http://www.getcheapsecuredloans.com will generate more mileage for you than cheapgetsecuredloans.com. Equally important is the "add on word" When you add a relevant term such as an action or transitive verb such as "get" the domain name becomes even more powerful. Hence, http://getcheapsecuredloans.com will generate a higher ranking for you than cheapsecuredloans.com all else being equal.
Search engine spiders, search bots and indexers have become intelligent enough to be able to parse the domain name and match it up with their hyper indexes. Therefore, it is no longer necessary or meaningful for you to register top level domain names with dashes or hyphen. It is also a good idea to register domain names with a .com extension. Acquire a domain name with a .net extension only if a .com is not available. The Search engine love affair with the first generation top level domain names such as .com, .net or .org isn't a thing of the past yet and the second generation top level domain names such as .mobi and .biz still have ways to go. You can always read my earlier article on domain names Choosing a SEO friendly Domain Name, or Are Domain Names with Hyphens and Dashes SEO Unfriendly. The same holds true for domain names with country-specific extensions such as .e for Germany and .ru for Russia. Everything else being equal, as long as a search result with a .com or .net is available for the major search engines to display in their results, a country-specific domain name may not get preference on the global search (google.com), but will result well in the country specific searches (google.co.in) Personal experience and what might be best described as intuitive and unscientific research has also led us to believe that optimized web pages housed in sub-domains, too don't make it to the list. If you have a set of landing pages for instance which must be indexed preferentially, try not to house them under a sub-domain. It is well worth your while to invest less then seven US dollars in an independent, search engine friendly domain name and put them out for the major search engines such as Yahoo and MSN to index them.
It is important, therefore, that you plan your domain naming strategy carefully first before registering a domain name because as Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth would say, what is done cannot be undone!
· Who on Earth is "Whois"
Before we tell you who "Whois" is, its relevance to SEO strategy and how it is related to the major search engines, we need to take a moment and tell you about localized and geo-targeted search. Over the past few months, all the major search engines have been gradually, steadily but surely moving toward serving up more relevant results by displaying local search results. For instance, if you were planning to send your son or daughter to a tennis academy in your city, type "tennis school" or "tennis classes" into Google's search box and you will notice that many of the results displayed will link you to tennis academies in your immediate area. This intuitive ability to connect you with your local community is not the exception but the rule and as time passes, more and more search results will display local establishments in your area that offer the product or service you seek. As an icing on the proverbial SER cake, millions of results are also being indexed to street map, directions and other logistics data through Map Quest, Google Maps and other services.
Google and possibly the other major search engines seem to have established a referencing system which accesses the Whois records of a domain name. A Whois record contains complete information about your domain name including your geographical location. This is the same referencing technology currently being used by a large number of web analytics programs such as HitBox, SAS and ClickTracks. A sample record from Whois which you can access by visiting http://whois.org looks like this:
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· Go Windows or Linux.
This is most certainly the million dollar question in any web hosting-SEO debate. Each platform has its own distinct advantages and flaws and this is perhaps an inappropriate forum to discuss this. The search engine spiders have, in effect, been impartial in this matter. Web sites hosted on both platforms are uniformly indexed by the major search engines continuously round the clock. The key is to use search engine friendly code, provide HTML meta tags liberally and craft a SEO friendly search map where pages are linked mostly from text links. The web hosting company should provide your web site with sufficient bandwidth with a 99.9% up time. Windows-based hosting servers have to be shut down at least once a month if not more for routine maintenance and Microsoft update installations and Heaven forbid that the search engine spider comes looking for your site at that time. The more state-of-the-art your hosting company's system resources are, the better your site's performance. Your minimum server configuration should be:
Hosting System featuring Intel Pentium 4 with Quad Processors and at least 1 GB RAM and 24X7 power backup
Even if your web site is on a shared hosting platform, there is no distinct disadvantage. The key is to ensure that the web hosting hardware is well maintained and all logs are preserved for administrative access.
About the Author
Naveen Kapur is a senior SEO and SEM consultant with more than ten years of core experience in multimedia and graphic design, website optimization and Internet marketing. He helps organizations achieve their corporate objectives by building an online presence on the Internet.
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