How important is it to have a good domain name? and what effects does google put on extensively long domains or new domains.

Right in this post i am going to use a customer of First Search SEO as an example.

Our client has a less than 6 month old domain name and currently comes up for very little of the ‘Key Phrases’ that we have optimised the site to appear for. Now we think they may be many reasons that the site may not be working and a couple are relevant to the domain name.

Issues concerning the domain and are as follows:

• The domain has been ‘sand boxed’ due to being a young domain and is trying to compete with older more established domains.
• The second idea is that the domain name is too long.

Now both these ideas are grey areas in search engine optimisation and no-ones sure whether domains can actually get sand boxed etc.

 Young Domains?

If the domain is new, i personally do not see the problem this would have when listing with search engines as i do not think this would matter and the results of this theory of often inconsistant. At First Search SEO we have seen both new domains do well and badly as in this case.

Long Domains?

Now we all know that the search engines rate domain names highly in terms of importance, is there a restriction of this? as if i have a specific search result i wish to come up for i could buy that exact domain.

for example:

Wood floor lining cornwall

so i could buy : www.woodfloorliningcornwall.co.uk

Also i have seen this happening across the world of SEM and am now wondering if the search engines have picked up on it and are penalizing extremely long domains?

The customer in question:

Absence Management – www.absencemanagementlimited.com

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The term frequency is a weighted measure of how often a search terms appears in a document or in our case a web site. Does Google and other search engines rate the importance of this as much as we think?

Most optimisers understand the concept that search engines ignore common words, such as ‘and’ ‘or’ ‘a’ ‘the’, so they have this in mind when writing a web page. These words hold no great value to the reader or valve of the page itself.

The Inverse Document Frequency (IDF) theory says that key phrases that are in a limited number of documents are more likely to tell you about the sites purpose, rather than key phrases scattered throughout many documents.

Have you checked your key phrases density lately? Do you think that your site could be classed as spamming?

This is a neat little tool, check it out
http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php

Search Engine Optimisation and Search Engine Marketing