As mentioned in yesterday’s post how does google decide who to put on page 1 of their search rankings there are more than 200 elements that the google algorithm is looking for in order to index a webpage and give it a rating which will affect it’s ranking. However one consistant factor that has always been relevant to top quality SEO is the domain name.
Domain names have historically always been used as part of a branding exercise by businesses ie they want to have their domain name to be their business name. This is understandable as a website could be receiving traffic from several angles eg newspaper/magazine adverts mentioning the website, your business card having your website address on it, leaflets carrying your website address etc…. but Google has now got so much traction in our society that many small/medium businesses have the opportunity to use SEO to virtually replace their advertising budgets at a fraction of their previous marketing spend.
On that basis, having your business name in your website domain name becomes less relevant so an industry and geo targetted generic phrase like HotelBrisbane.com.au or PodaitristSunshineCoast allows you to give your Search Engine Optimisation an extra boost as one of the 200+ ranking factors in the algorithm is the relevance of the domain name to the specific search phrase (eg for HotelBrisbane.com.au the boost would be for searches of Hotel Brisbane as well as Hotel in Brisbane and Brisbane Hotel). This factor is by no means a dominant one but it is amazing how often we see sites with an exact match domain name to a search phrase ranking on page 1 even if they have significantly less going for them in the other algorithm factors than other sites on page 1.
