[ Basic SEO: One – Two – Three – Four – Five ]
Basic SEO, what is it? I consider basic SEO the easy stuff, the gravy, but it is often overlooked. Let’s start at the top.
Domain Name: The longer it has been active the better but wait, how long before it expires? If your domain name expires in 2 or 3 months then you might be penalized. It makes sense doesn’t it? If you waited that long to renew it and you aren’t willing to get off your wallet for more than a 1 year registration then you might be losing points with the search engines. Are you letting it expire? What if a potential client does a little Whois research and sees that your domain expires in 20 days? Stop being cheap and cough up a few bucks for 2 or more years registration fees.
Domain Names: If you have multiple domain names pointing to the same website then be sure to have your webmaster set up a permanent 301 redirect. If you don’t then you might be indexed as multiple, separate, websites and that’s not good for a few reasons including duplicate content issues. This is well known but what about blizzarddigital.com vs www.blizzarddigital.com ? Yes, some search engines might index these as two different sites. It makes sense doesn’t it? Replace “www.” with “blog.” and you see what I mean. Imagine you have 25 inbound links to your domain name with www and 8 without the www. You had no control over those inbound links. People found your site, thought it was worth linking to and they created the link without any input from you. You can try to look up or track those inbound links, contact the webmaster, beg them to add the www, or you can have a permanent 301 redirect and the search engines can do their job. You could use Google Webmaster Tools to inform Google that you want them to index with or without the www but that only takes care of the issue for one search engine.
This is one more area that you have control, take advantage of it and go fix those domain name issues, then come back for the next chapter. If you need to choose a domain name then you need to read chapter 2.
Tags: 301 redirect, Domain Expiration, Domain Name, Host Name