The domain name, how long you have owned it and how long you renew it for will all affect your website rankings. Getting top SEO results is not about doing one thing right, it is about hundreds of factors that search engines like Google take into account.

Keywords: Using keywords in your domain name has consistently been an effective SEO strategy. It is common knowledge that keywords are the foundation that search engine optimization is based on. Using keywords in your URL provides a clue to potential site visitors what your website is about. Search engines will also use this to help determine your sites relevance to a particular search term. The domain name words should be separated with hyphens for maximum effectiveness.

Length of Time: How old your domain name is and how many years you renew your domain name for both affect rankings. Older domains and renewing for 5 or more years are valued more, particularly by Google. Google has an aging filter that discounts new URLs and values older domain names.

Change of Ownership: Selling or transferring a domain and website to a new owner without changing website content or structure does not seem to affect rankings. Changing servers or IP also doesn’t seem to hurt rankings. However, if you move your web site to being hosted by a company that mainly hosts the web sites of spammers, then this can hurt your rankings (bad neighborhood).

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 28th, 2007 at 5:36 am and is filed under Internet Marketing, SEO Strategies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.