Seven tips to plan for optimal search engine rankings

Before you register your new domain name, review this list for a head start on making sure your Web site will be ready for high search engines rankings.

1. Decide on your domain name.

A good domain name is distinct, memorable and easy to spell. It is common for your domain name to be the name of your business. However, you may also consider putting one or two of your keywords (or top services or products) in your domain name. If you are creating a Web site for a business venture or project that is unnamed yet, consider including an industry keyword when naming your new business. A good length for a domain name is two or three words.

When you think of a domain name you like, you can check to see if it’s available using a domain registration web site. Type in your domain name on their home page, press enter and their results will tell you if it’s available.

We use Dotster for our domain registrations. Dotster also has tools that will suggest alternate domain names if the one you want is taken or they’ll give you ideas for domain names if you type in your selected keywords.

2. Verify your desired domain name’s status.

Once you’ve found a domain name that you like and verified it is available to register, it’s important to check if someone owned the domain before you. Some domains have been used as “spam” sites or other sites that may have been penalized and banned by search engines such as Google.

One way to check to see if the domain has been used before is using The Way Back Machine which takes snapshots of Web sites throughout their history and saves them in an archive. Enter the domain name you’re interested in right on their home page and check to see if there are any results. If so, take a look at the results by clicking on the dates listed. If the results you see look like a “spam” site or a link farm — sites full of links, ads or selling questionable products — you may want to reconsider this domain. If the results look like a legitimate Web site that simply stopped being used, you’re probably ok.

One other way to check if you’re picking up a bad domain is to do a quick search on Yahoo and MSN. (If Google banned the site, it won’t show any results for the domain.) Do a “site search” on your desired domain name by typing in your “site:www.yourdomainname.com” in the search box. If no results show up, your domain may never have been used. If results do show up, take a look at their “cached” version and apply the same type of review to see if they site looks legitimate.

3. Register your domain name for more than one year.

While it’s unproven, some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts suggest you can increase in your rankings if your domain is registered more than one year. Those that set up “spam” Web sites with cookie-cutter content or lots of ads typically register a domain for one year and then get rid of it. Registering your domain for more than one year indicates you plan to stay in business and invest in your Web site.

4. Use a quality hosting company.

Finding a reputable hosting company is essential for your Web site’s success. A good hosting company is responsive to customer service issues, does regular backups, has multiple internet connections and offers a variety of services. Consider whether or not you want your own IP address or if you’ll be on a shared IP address. If you’re on a shared server with a share IP address, you can be penalized if one of the other sites gets blacklisted for sending out spam.

We like LunarPages. Rated one of the top ten overall hosting companies in Jan 2006 by Hosting Review, LunarPages offers prompt and friendly customer service, their control panel cpanel x is very easy to use, they give customers great access to manage their domain, they offer static IPs and they have reasonable prices.

5. Set up a Web site statistics program.

Set up a traffic statistic program to monitor who is visiting your Web site, what pages they’re viewing and where they come from. Many Web hosting companies offer control panels that include a default statistics programs. Find out what your hosting company will provide. A detailed statistics program will show you top keyword phrases, what search engines your visitors found you on, search engine bots results will be filtered out (bots are the seach engine’s way to go out and crawl the Web), and what Web sites your visitors are coming from. If your hosting company’s default stats program doesn’t offer all this, it is worth the investment to set up a comprehensive traffic and stats tool.

An online statistics program we use that’s super easy to set up and has highly detailed and user-friendly stats is StatCounter. Another traffic analyzing program we like that comes preinstalled on some web hosting plans (and can be installed on others) is called AWstats. After being closed to new registrations due to exceptionally high demand, Google reports they intend to reopen their Google Analytics service which provides sophisticated analysis of web traffic, ad campaigns and visitor activity. Numerous other software packages can be installed on your web hosting server to finely track details on your Web site traffic.

6. Decide on your primary URL.

Having consistent links to your Web site is important. Decide whether you want links to your Web site to go to www or not. For example, do you want your Web site to be found at http://www.yourwebsite.com or http://yourwebsite.com? Once, you decide on your primary URL, you’ll want to use it consistently on all your marketing materials (including business cards, brochures, Web site submissions, other links to your site). Search engines usually do a good job of figuring out your preferred domain name. However, if links to your Web site are inconsistent, search engines might be splitting your search results, page rank, and credit for inbound links across two different domains.

When you have purchased your hosting service, set up your server (or ask for your webmaster’s help) to redirect traffic to the preferred url you’ve decided on. Be sure to set up a redirect that search engines approve of. We use a 301 redirect in our .htaccess file. Anyone that goes to http://qdigitalstudio.com will get automatically redirected to http://www.qdigitalstudio.com. Some good information on setting up a redirect can be found on Ekstreme. Don’t use a javascript redirect (search engines don’t like them!) and make sure you double-check your work.

7. Put your first pages online.

Although it is not officially acknowledged, Google appears to use something SEO folks and webmasters refer to as a “sandbox” or aging filter. The “sandbox” filter acts as filter that dampens a new web site’s rankings in results pages while the web site goes through an initation period. (Read more on Mark Daoust’s article Google’s Giant Sandbox.)

Knowing this, you can see it would be useful for Google to know about your Web site as soon as possible. Your Web site will be working it’s way out of the “sandbox” while you finish building your full-featured Web site. As soon as you have your first pages up, find one (or more) sites that will link to yours. This may be a business partner, vendor, or a professional colleague or even a friend. We list and link to our clients’ sites when we begin new project or launch new initiatives.

Top search engine rankings depend on a variety of factors including your domain name, how long your site has been online, how many and which sites link to yours, and the amount and quality of your content. We’ve just covered the beginning: getting your domain name and putting up your first pages. Once you have an initial presence online, it’s time to get started on investing in your Web site. Plan to build a great Web site! It’s an ongoing process and well worth your reward: new customers and a successful online business.