Domain and URL Optimization

Website URL

Before optimizing any website, collect information about the website URL. Domain name and domain age plays a major role in SEO.

1. Domain Name

If the URL has targeted keywords, spiders will give importance for those particular keywords as part of their ranking methods. Since search engines will consider the website has more information related to the targeted keywords. Choose hyphen (-) related URL for key phrases because it separates each words with the symbol and website will be listed for key phrase along with keywords appearing in the domain. Individual keywords are highlighted while using hyphen in URL. Recent years, many search engines follow above strategy and it helps to achieve better search results.

Example: http://www.sample-domain.com/

In the above listed example, “sample domain” key phrase can be targeted for the domain. Also “sample” and “domain” keywords targeted independently.

2. Sub-pages URL

While affording URL name to the sub pages, create with keywords related to the content. Spider can identify the sub-page name too.

Example: www.domain.com/pc-technical-support.html

Landing page has pc or computer technical support associated content, so the URL has been created with that particular keyword.

Search engines cannot read the URL appearing after second query string (?). Minimize the number of query string parameters to 1 or 2 in it.

Example: http://www.domain.com/Inner.php?page=test&acctid=100539

Optimized URL: http://www.domain.com/sample-text.php

Implement “301 redirection” with optimized URL to overcome this query string problem.

3. Domain Age

Bots will give priority to age of the website and length of time a domain has been registered. Old domain will be considered more important than the new domain because bots will trust the age old domains. It doesn’t mean that domain age is the only factor to rank well in top SERP.

4. IP Address

Local search engines will list websites based on the IP address. Consider when the visitor from UK types http://www.google.com/, it redirects to http://www.google.co.uk/ by tracking the visitors system IP address. If the visitor makes any searches, most of the top results might be from domains hosted in that particular country or region.

5. Domain Extension

Nowadays, search engines are giving more weight-age to educational (www.sample.edu) and government (www.sample.gov) websites. Because those website will give more valuable and trusted information’s to the user. Next to these domains .com is considered by bots and then .co.uk, .co.au, .co.in, etc.

6. URL Redirection

URL redirection is to check whether domain is transmitted to any other website. Basically, redirecting is classified into two types 301 and 302.

• 301 Redirect
  
  Site owner may purchase multiple domains and displaying same information with similar layout on all domains which may divide the traffic or visitors to each domain or owner need to transfer all past pages to the new one. To overcome this problem, all the domains or pages can be redirected to a single domain using 301 redirection. This will be a permanent URL redirection so better choose best URL for the website.
  
• 302 Redirect
  
  Some sites may require temporary redirection for particular URL which can be done using 302 redirection.

When spider or visitor request for the page from your website while redirect is in effect, the server requests the page and respond with message either “301 moved permanently” or “302 moved temporarily”. It is recommended to implement 301 redirect in your website because 302 redirect will lead your website banned in all search engines.

Page Rank (PR)

Page Rank is a method of ranking individual web pages by Google and indicates the importance of that web page. It shows more people visits the particular page because of the quality content or information. Page Rank can be easily identified through Google Tool bar. It is easy to download and install. After installing the tool enable the page rank from more option and you can identify a PR bar icon on the tool bar. Finally, PR can be seen for each individual pages by placing the mouse over the bar icon.

For more information about page rank calculation method, visit http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html.

Some pages show “No Page Rank information available” because either Google bot haven’t crawled the particular page or Google has spammed the page under SPAM issues. If your page has violated, follow the webmaster guidelines clear the issue and submit to Google webmaster tools for re-inclusion in the index. Please be patient until your web page been crawled by the bot.