Wednesday, 07 March - 08:11 Category: SEO

Get Your Spare Domain Names Working For You

SYNOPSIS:  So you've got lots of domain names?  Now what?  I discuss the concept of deep linking to bring about increased search engine ranking for your site.

Here's an interesting little search engine optimisation query that we often come across’¦

Most businesses have more than one domain name.  Nearly everybody has a domain name which relates to their company name but also one that relates to a product or service.  (Our main website is www.morganwylie.co.uk but this blog is on www.webmarketingblog.co.uk.)  They form part of our corporate real estate but are more regularly found to be unproductively gathering dust.  How can we put them to use?

For the most part you will want to build your brand identity and therefore, publicise only one domain name in the offline world.  But let's say you create a new product and launch it.  Wouldn't it make sense to put the domain name specific to the product on your offline literature and either point that domain name to a micro-site or specific page on your main site?  As soon as somebody types the domain name in they get taken to the specific page about that product.  (This sounds obvious but you would be amazed how many companies I know that have countless product based domain names all pointing at their main home page instead of the actual product pages.)

So, let's imagine that you decide to write an article about one of your products.  At the bottom of your article you would put the product domain name and not your company domain name.  Now let's also imagine that you send this article out on to the Internet.  Naturally enough you are expecting the domain name link at the bottom of the page to count heavily in your favour with the search engines as it is marked as an inbound link onto your website.  And you'd be right.  Now consider that the words used in your domain URL are one of the criteria used by search engines in computing your site rank (along with the domain’™s age, content, visitors and about a billion other things Google will never tell you).  So if your article discusses your new Whizbang product range you should use your www.our-whizbang-products.co.uk domain name.

Let's go for an example to make this ultra clear.  One of my business friends (from whom this question arose) owns the domain www.you-unltd.co.uk (You Unlimited is their business name).  However, they also own www.trainingpeoplelove.co.uk (training being one of their service areas).  The correct approach to maximise their search engine ranking would be to use the latter URL when posting articles online which relate to "training" and "people".  That URL would link to an appropriate page on their website discussing the keywords in greater detail.

Just remember the SEO golden rule; relevance, relevance, relevance.

(Incidentally, linking to specific parts of your site is called "deep linking" and is seen as a really effective search engine optimisation approach.)

Find out more about how you can radically improve your search engine rankings

Posted By:Jed Wylie on Wed, Mar 7th 2007, 08:11