Websites Design and SEO Blog

In my first post I talked about the necessity to plan for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) even before designing a website. One obvious reason is that everything in life should be carefully planned. A website should match the targeted audience, such as demography and services or products sold; this will have an impact on the design itself. Other things can be less obvious, especially when we talk of SEO.

Something that needs careful thinking is the name of your website. This is one of the most important aspects of SEO: URL’s. What is a URL? Explaining that it stands for Uniform Resource Locator, helps very little. In other words, it is what follows the HTTP:// (or HTTPS://) in your web browser when you surf the Internet.

Why is this so important? Because a good SEO strategy is using keywords, without stuffing it, in the URL. This gives more relevance to those keywords when searched through a Search Engine. This is also true for the name of pages. A few little suggestions:

• never use capitals
• divide words using the hyphen “-” and NOT the underscore”_”
• avoid unnecessary words such as, or, but, in, and etc
• avoid using numbers

When it comes to the choice of the name for your website, think about this. You are not probably a celebrity or a well established business that everybody in the world knows. So, if you are a jeweler in NYC and your name is John Smith (not very original here), what would your website’s name look like? Something like johnsmith.com or nycjeweler.com? The latter is a better choice because the name contains a keyword and says something about your business, while the former does NOT say a thing about your business and has no relevant keywords in it.  Due to the scarcity of available names, you will probably be forced to separate 2 words with a hyphen; try to avoid this if possible.

A few suggestion for your domain name (which is the part of the URL immediately following the www.)

• keep it as short and simple as possible (there are too many ways to misspell a name to take chances)
• it MUST have a relevant keyword in it
• hyphens in the name can be used (best if you can avoid this)
• use preferably a “.com” domain

I did not talk about keywords, yet. After the brainstorming about a new business venture and what to load your website with (content, products and services), the research for the best possible keywords MUST take place.