Category Archives: Keywords

How To Choose A Domain Name For SEO

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Choosing a permanent web address is just like buying a new home in the cyber world. It requires some consideration, especially if you have SEO in mind. Besides branding and long-term commitment (a domain name must be registered for at least 1 year), a domain name can also make or break a website’s search engine ranking.

What’s in a name?

A good URL should be simple and straightforward so users can easily remember it. Take Yahoo! and Google, as examples. The company name is the first priority, but a word or words that can easily be identified with the business is also commonly used.

Try to think what words your users would most likely enter into the search engines when looking for your website. Such words are referred to in the SEO world as “keywords”. Having your target keyword on the URL makes it easier for search engines to identify your website as an expert on the field. These keywords would also most likely end up in the anchor text that other people will create, when linking to your site. So, why else did we name this site “seo website“?

Quality check

Just because your keyword is “death defying stunts of the 21st century”, it doesn’t mean that you have to dot-com the whole phrase. Long phrases are generally harder to memorize, and search engines also do not know how to separate each word in a URL.

Case in point, domainsextension.com can be interpreted as “domains extension”, or “do main sex tension”. So, try to stay away from domains like these because search engines tend to block websites that have the slightest hint of indecency.

If you won’t change your mind about the choice of words, better use hyphens (domains-extension.com) because these are seen as blank spaces by search engines. Copyrighted words must also be avoided because these may result to copyright issues later on.

Picking a TLD

Any SEO expert will tell you that a .com is the best top-level domain (TLD) to get. This is because .com is widely used and easy to remember. It is also the most appropriate for commercial business entities.

You may encounter others who would say that search engines put more importance to .com sites over others, like the .info. Although there is no real proof to this, it is a fact that .info domains are cheaper, and so these are more likely to be used by spam creators. We know that search engines do not like spam, so it could possibly be one of the reasons why .info seems to rank low in SERPs.

The domain name is only one of the many factors that search engines consider when ranking search results. Beneath its face value, there are still a few more things to learn about domain names and SEO. In the meantime, start creating quality content. After all, content still holds the top spot in ranking a website.

 

 

 

 

SEO Writing: Keyword Density FAQ

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Keyword density was all the hype many years ago, when search engines worked on much simpler algorithms. Just sprinkle your content with enough keywords and phrases and you will see your website rocket to the top of the results page.

Nowadays, SEO work is more complex and to check keyword density is on the bottom of the to-do list. It’s mostly because the practice has been abused to the extent that search engines penalize pages with overly redundant keywords.

What is keyword density?

For those who are new to this, keyword density is the ratio of keywords or phrases to the total number of words in an article. Back then, topic relevancy was gauged on the number of times a keyword appears in an article.

What is the best keyword density ratio?

Now, the tricky question. Many SEO experts keep a keyword density of around 2 percent (calculation details explained in Wiki). This is not bad, nor is it a cut and dry figure.

The relevancy of a page to a search term has evolved to include more defining factors, not just a single set of words. Search engines know better than to pick webpages showing the same key words or phrases again and again (which sounds too fabricated).

How to use keywords wisely?

Somebody masterfully writing about a subject would write variations of a key phrase and even include related terms in a single article. This means that an article merely mentioning laptop coolers in a blog is different than an article review for the same thing because the text would most likely have other related words like “USB”, “fan”, “temperature” and even a mention of brand names.

Is keyword density outdated?

If there’s one thing you can do to optimize your target keywords in an article, it is to include them in the header tags – h1 and h2 (title and sections) and so on. Words put into header tags convey importance, and this is exactly how search engines see it.

Similarly, emphasized (html tag <em>) and strong (html tag <strong>) words provide the needed highlight for crawlers to easily spot them.

To say not to check keyword density anymore may be too extreme. There is still some importance in checking keyword density. First, to know whether your article is keyword stuffed (which is not good); and next is to check whether the text is highlighting the wrong terms – a result of consciously avoiding the keyword you’re supposedly running after.

Whether you actively check keyword density or not, as long as you write naturally and the article flow is good, they keyword density will most likely fall within the 2% range.