(973) 887-0778

Rank Magic

SEO for small and very small businesses.

Home » domains/URLs

domains/URLs

by Leave a Comment

How to Choose a Domain Name for Your Small Business

/ domains/URLs, web design / Leave a Comment

Your domain name is important

Your domain name is important. Choose it wisely.
Your domain name is important. Choose it wisely.

When you’re creating a website for a new business, how you choose the domain name for your website can be more important than you think. It’ll represent your business in a unique way and it will become as important a branding consideration as your company name.

You want it to reflect your company, but there are several other considerations as well.

How to choose a domain name

Decide on your top level domain.

This is the suffix at the end of your website address. Businesses should normally have a .com top level domain (TLD). But there are exceptions. Internet-based businesses, like web designers, may want a .net TLD. Not for-profit businesses and trade organizations may be best served by a .org TLD. And of course colleges and universities qualify for a .edu TLD.  Also consider that the Search Engine Institute recommends avoiding .info domain names claiming that they have a reputation for being spammy websites.  Learn more about TLDs here.

Start with your company name

Does it lend itself to a unique domain name for your website? Or does another business already have a domain name that matches your company name?

How to Choose a Domain Name for Your Small Business

Click To Tweet

Consider including keywords

If your name includes keywords, so much the better. Jones Brothers Plumbing Co. might choose JonesPlumbing.com or JonesBrothersPlumbing.com. The keyword is likely to be slightly helpful in search rankings.

You can also think about geographic keywords — like MorristownPlumbers.com. But don’t get carried away with something  like MorristownNewJerseyPlumbingAndHeating.com.

My 5 rules for a good domain name

I wrote about five rules for choosing a domain name more than ten years ago, and I’m happy to say they seem to have stood the test of time.

  1. Easy to remember
  2. Hard to misspell
  3. Make it a .com TLD
  4. Avoid hyphens
  5. Shorter is better than longer.

Beyond this, you may find that the domain name you’ve chosen has already been taken. It may be in use, or it may be held by a squatter who ill happily sell it to you for an exorbitant fee. If that happens, you may find some help in this article from Search Engine Journal: What to Do When the .COM You Want Is Taken.

Choose your domain name thoughtfully

And finally, look at your domain name with a careful eye. Make sure you don’t choose an unfortunate domain name that can be easily or disastrously mis-read. I have a few surprisingly bad examples here.

This is Pen Island, not Penis Land.If you found this helpful, please share it with the buttons on the left or the Click-To-Tweet above.

Your thoughts and opinions are welcome. Join the discussion in comments below.

by Leave a Comment

Unfortunate Domain Name Decisions

/ domains/URLs / Leave a Comment

Some People Didn’t Think When Choosing their Domain Names

Oops!You may be amused by some of the domain names people have chosen. For some of them they discovered it too late and either went out of business or belatedly re-thought their decisions. But a surprising number of them are still alive under their amusing domains.

Here are some classics that aren’t there anymore.

  • Experts Exchange, a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views:
    http://www.expertsexchange.com
  • Need a therapist?
    http://www.therapistfinder.com
  • New to Milan and you need electricity? Why not sign up on-line with Power-Gen?
    http://www.powergenitalia.com
  • Looking for kids’ clothes? Try Children’s Wear
    http://www.childrenswear.com/
  • There’s also the online training company Via Grafix
    http://www.viagrafix.com/
  • A French arborist, Les Bocages
    lesbocages.com
  • Top MP3 songs – MP3s Hits
    mp3shits.com
  • TV personal advice celebrity Ben Dover
    bendover.com
  • Language teachers
    teacherstalking.org
  • A bedspread company in Los Angeles
    ladrape.com
Unfortunate domain name choices.

Click To Tweet

And some others are still there.

That’s probably more than any of us really need to know, but the moral of the story is — make sure your domain name can’t be read wrong.

by Leave a Comment

Protect Your SEO Investment: Own Your Domain

/ domains/URLs / Leave a Comment

True Story: A Cautionary Tale of Domain Ownership

Do you know who owns your business’s domain name?

A client of mine was a local chiropractic center. They had a reasonably acceptable website, but it had never been optimized. Without SEO, they just did not show up in search. To fix that, they hired us to optimize their site. When it came time to apply our optimization to their site, they had a falling out with their website design company. It was so bad that they decided they needed to move to a new company to host and support their website.

Their old web person had registered their domain for them; let’s call it LocalChiropractor.net. When it came time to move it, their web person wouldn’t allow it, wanting to retain the income for hosting the website. Suddenly it became clear that this client did not own their domain name. Their web company had registered it in their own name and refused to release it.

Aarrgghh! Domain ownership isn't always obvious to a small business owner. But it's important.
Make sure you own your own domain name.

Moving to a brand-new domain name would have caused them to lose all SEO benefits and search visibility that had been earned by the old website.

Only because they had no visibility at all yet did they really have nothing to lose.

And fortunately for them their web company had registered them a .net domain name. Having a .com domain instead of a .net domain is important for small business.

Fortunately, I was able to help them register LocalChiropractor.com which matched their previous domain except with .com instead of .net. We optimized that and they now have enviable visibility on Google.

If this client had earned good Google rankings on their old domain, all of that would have been lost and they would been starting from scratch. It would have taken them many months to catch up to where they had been before.

It’s super important to own your own domain name. Do you? Are you sure?

Click To Tweet

Moral of the story

Make sure you, and not your website or marketing company, own your own domain name. It’s your business and you’re entitled to full control. If you’re not sure, check with whoever registered your domain for you.

We welcome you to join the conversation in the Comments section below.

Did you find this helpful? If so, please share it with the buttons on the left or the Click To Tweet above.

Finally, how do you show up when someone searches for you without knowing your company name? It’s easy to find out! Just click here.

by 1 Comment

Make Your Small Business Website Secure with HTTPS

/ domains/URLs, SEO practices / 1 Comment

HTTPS padlock icon

What is HTTPS?

Many normal website URLs start with HTTP:// which specifies the standard language for a browser to download a website.

Unfortunately, that’s not secure enough to protect things like your login to your bank or any other site where you share important information like credit card numbers.

A secure site begins with  HTTPS://. HTTPS encrypts all the data between the browser and the website, protecting it from prying eyes. You should always check before filing out forms with sensitive information; the easiest way is to look for the green closed padlock symbol to the left of the URL.

What if my site doesn’t take credit cards?

It feels like it shouldn’t matter for a small business website that never asks for anything sensitive like a social security number or credit card. Therefore, why bother? Why spend money to change your site?
The Google logo.

Because Google cares! As far back as 2014 Google said they were using it as a ranking signal and that they would weigh it more and more heavily as time went on.

Moz reported in 2016 that the portion of HTTPS sites on the first page of Google results had increased from about 5% to about 30%. Surely it’s even higher now.

Why small businesses need HTTPS

As a small business owner, you understand how tough it is to compete with larger, more established competitors. Every little thing that helps you rank better against them is critical to your business.

Even though HTTPS is not yet one of the half dozen strongest ranking signals on Google, it’s getting more important day by day. I believe now is the time it’s become important enough that it needs to be addressed, and earlier this year I converted this website to HTTPS.

Why your small business website needs to be secure.

Click To Tweet

Even your local small business competitors may be getting the jump on you by securing their own websites. You don’t want to be late to the party. Just see how widely this has become a “best practices” tool for you.

How tough is it to do?

Here are the three steps involved, thanks to Amy Gideon at TAG Online, Inc.

Step 1: Obtain a secure certificate.  The type of certificate can vary depending upon your hosting company and the level of security you want and need. So make sure to first check with your web hosting company on what type of certificate you need.

HTML coding may be required to make your site secure.Step 2: Once the certificate is installed, update your site to ensure that all links within the site are relative That means if your site displays an image called photo.jpg, the code that makes that image appear should be (assuming the image resides in the main directory): <img src=”/photo.jpg”>  as opposed to <img src=“http://www.yoursite.com/photo.jpg>. This is good practice for many reasons, but it also prevents the site from loading non-secure images, as the “http://” prefix will no longer work and would be insecure. Also update your site to ensure that there are no links or references that display content (PDFs or images, for example) linked from outside sites that are not secure. Here is a link to a tool that will scan your website for non-secure content: https://www.jitbit.com/sslcheck/.

[Update August, 2024]  Another free and easy place for checking whether your SSL certificate is installed properly and trusted by browsers can be found at https://www.websiteplanet.com/webtools/ssl-checker/.

Step 3: Test your site using HTTPS: if the green lock appears in the browser, then you can ask your web hosting company to redirect all requests to HTTP to now go to HTTPS.

Whether you’re a do-it-yourselfer or have your webmaster  do it, it’s time and effort well spent.

Comments, opinions, and disagreements are all welcome below. Join the conversation!

Need help with this or other aspects of optimizing your website? Give us a call.

by 2 Comments

Too Many Keywords In Your URL?

/ domains/URLs, Google / 2 Comments

Keywords in your URL are a good thing.

This is a URL. Don't make it too long.Having keywords in your URL can help your rankings.

For example, our web page describing local SEO has this URL: https://www.rankmagic.com/local-search-optimization/.  It contains the keywords local, search, and optimization.

But blog posts in particular can get pretty long because often by default the entire title of a blog post becomes part of the URL. For example, my blog post titled 6 Ways Small Business Owners Can Get More From Their SEO used to have this rather long URL: https;//www.rankmagic.com/blog/2013/09/6-ways-small-business-owners-can-get-seo/. I’ve since shortened it to https://www.rankmagic.com/6-ways-to-get-more-from-your-seo/ but it could have been streamlined even more.

Is that URL too long?

A few years ago, Stephan Spencer published an interview with Matt Cutts (“The Google Guy”) and that very question came up. Since we often recommend our clients establish and maintain a blog because of the many ways it can help search engine rankings, I thought it would be good to address this now. Here’s what Matt had to say about that:

If you can make your title four- or five-words long – and it is pretty natural. If you have got a three, four or five words in your URL, that can be perfectly normal. As it gets a little longer, then it starts to look a little worse. Now, our algorithms typically will just weight those words less and just not give you as much credit.

The thing to be aware of is, ask yourself: “How does this look to a regular user?” – because if, at any time, somebody comes to your page or, maybe, a competitor does a search and finds 15 words all strung together like variants of the same word, then that does look like spam, and they often will send a spam report. Then somebody will go and check that out.

So, I would not make it a big habit of having tons and tons of words stuffed in there, because there are plenty of places on a page, where you can have relevant words and have them be helpful to users – and not have it come across as keyword stuffing.

Why you shouldn’t have tons of words stuffed in your URL

Click To Tweet

Would something like 10 words be a bit too much, then?

It is a little abnormal. I know that when I hit something like that – even a blog post – with 10 words, I raise my eyebrows a little bit and, maybe, read with a little more skepticism. So, if just a regular savvy user has that sort of reaction, then you can imagine how that might look to some competitors and others.

There you have it. Don’t go too overboard with using keywords in your page file names and URLs, but within reason there’s nothing wrong with ensuring you have essential keywords in them.

Do you have any thoughts on Keyword rich URLS? Let us know in the comments below.

Find this helpful? If so, we’d appreciate a share on Twitter (above) on on the social media of your choice. The buttons are on the left side of this post for that.