Right from the very start of building your website, you should take into account all its future development prospects. The same applies to the subsequent hosting of your website online, as a well-chosen domain name is by no means a minor factor when it comes to promoting your site on search engines, which bring you up to 85% of all visitors.
Therefore, we will discuss the rules for choosing a domain to ensure your project is more successful in the future.
Let’s start by determining the level of your domain for website promotion. It must be a second-level domain only, for example, top.ua. If you purchase a third-level domain, you shouldn’t expect much favour from search engines at all; in this case, your website will be ranked significantly lower compared to other sites with the same parameters. And besides, why make your visitors memorise a long domain name, such as: moisayt.narod.ua.
Another significant drawback of a third-level domain is that you will most likely be obtaining it from a free hosting provider, which means you have no guarantee that your website won’t be taken down from the domain tomorrow for no apparent reason. And if the domain disappears, all your efforts to promote the site will vanish with it — this is the most significant drawback of free hosting.
Not to mention that you won’t be able to make money with a third-level domain, as links from such a domain aren’t taken into account by search engines. So, do you understand that the right domain for website promotion must be a second-level domain? Excellent.
Next, let’s look at choosing a domain extension for your website. If you plan to promote your site worldwide, use .com. If you plan to promote it within Ukraine, choose .com.ua or .co.ua.
And finally: a smart domain for website promotion should ‘tell’ you something about the site’s content, but without being too long.
The maximum length, including the domain extension, should be 10 characters, but the shorter the better!
How can you avoid making a mistake when buying a domain? Assessing trustworthiness
Most experienced webmasters know that it is much easier to promote a website using an established, trusted domain than to start the promotion process from scratch. Domains with strong metrics can be resold at a high price – this is one way to make use of them.
You can then use the domain in line with its subject matter – submit the new site to link brokers, such as Sape or Linkfeed, where page views are the key metric. And if the domain already has a loyal audience and traffic, that’s brilliant; it’s much easier to promote such a domain further. Furthermore, purchased domains can be used for doorway pages, whose metrics grow rapidly on trusted domains.
These days, finding a decent domain for a new project is no longer a problem. There is a service called domain4seo.com that can help you with this. The service provides you with reliable information on the metrics of domains up for auction, presented in the form of a summary of their specifications.
This means you aren’t buying a domain blindly, like a pig in a poke, but are making an informed decision based on the specific metrics provided to you by domain4seo.com.
We would like to present the following figures to you:
- domain name
- registration date
- number of indexed pages
- PageRank
- Thematic Citation Index
- Listing in DMOZ and many others.
In short, the domain4seo.com service is extremely useful for any webmaster, but we won’t be discussing it here; instead, we’ll focus on the metrics you should consider when purchasing a domain.
Understanding Domain Trust
You shouldn’t rely solely on PageRank or its manipulation, as some webmasters do. PR can be artificially inflated by redirecting traffic from one domain to another, and after the next update, the PR may drop to zero. Webmasters, tempted by a high PR (over four), strive at all costs to buy this domain, paying between $100 and $200 for it, and after it drops to zero, spend a long time looking for someone to blame.
So, what should you bear in mind when buying a domain to avoid regretting money wasted later on? After all, here, as in any other field, you should invest your money wisely. To begin with, you need to understand what a trusted domain is. The word ‘trust’ is of English origin and translates as ‘confidence’, i.e. a domain’s trust is the confidence placed in it by search engines. What do search engines base their decisions on when determining which domains are trustworthy? First and foremost, the age of the domain, the volume of unique content and the backlink profile.
Backlink Profile Evaluation
A strong backlink profile should be what motivates you to buy a domain, not just the numbers on a spreadsheet. A backlink profile refers to the quantity and quality of websites linking to your domain; the higher this figure is, the more profit your domain will generate.
An experienced webmaster can easily boost a domain’s PageRank from scratch if the domain has a strong backlink profile. Google raises the PageRank of such a site as soon as the first update is released. How can you identify a high-quality backlink profile?
Monitor the metrics of the websites linking to your domain. You need 70–80% of links to lead to internal pages on your site. It is also important to consider which pages are linking to your site — it’s a painstaking task, but one that cannot be avoided.
Domain Levels: Second vs Third
Choosing the right domain for website promotion is by no means a trivial matter, as it has a significant impact on the site’s search engine performance and, moreover, on its ability to attract the attention of a loyal audience.
Consequently, this matter should be approached with the necessary degree of responsibility, taking into account all the fundamental selection criteria. If you wish to avoid unnecessary complications in the future, it would be best to decide in advance that a second-level domain is the right choice for promoting your website.
If you do want to save money, however, you should first familiarise yourself with the downsides you can expect:
- Third-level domains are of little value, which is why they are offered for free. However, this also means that you are not actually the owner, and if one day the hosting provider decides to take the domain away from you, there is nothing you can do to prevent it. And once you lose the domain, all your website’s metrics will be lost, as they are tied specifically to that address. Consequently, you will have to start your journey to search engine success with a new URL and absolutely from scratch.
- Search engines, to put it mildly, do not favour third-level domains, considering them to be substandard addresses. In other words, despite all your efforts, the site’s metrics will grow extremely slowly, whereas with the right second-level domain for promoting the site, such difficulties might not arise at all.
- Third-level domains tend to be extremely long and convoluted, meaning that not everyone can remember them at first attempt.
- If you wish to monetise your project, you can immediately rule out the possibility of selling articles and links, as search engines simply won’t accept links from your long domain address.
Extensions, Branding, and Final Advice
Once you are fully convinced that, for the right domain to promote your website, only the second-level domain needs to be specified, you should consider the top-level domain—that is, the domain extension of your future address. This is traditionally determined by the website’s language and its potential audience; for Ukraine, it would be best to choose .ua, which our users regard as the default domain extension.
When you come up with the right domain name for promoting your website, you’re essentially creating a brand of sorts; after all, if a user can quickly remember your address, then later on, should they need your information, they’ll be able to type the URL straight into their browser rather than searching for it in their bookmarks. So, you need an address that sticks in the memory almost automatically; then your choice will clearly be a good one.
Buy high-quality, trusted domains and use them to make money. Good luck!