Before optimizing your on page factors and building the inbound links to your sites, you first need to look at your domain name and URL structure.

Here are a few tips from statistical research about domain names and URLs that might be contrary to what you have heard in the Internet Marketing forums...

Include Your Keyword
The keyword that best describes your site should be included in your domain name. Use Overture.com inventory tool or WordTracker.com to find the keyword that has some search volume. Try not to use a keyword no one is searching for.

Avoid Dashes
People have already taken many .com domains that are good keywords. But these domains can still be registered when hyphens or dashes are use to separate the individual keywords. The idea behind this was to help Google see the keywords. However, Google can see the individual keywords in a domain name even if there are no hyphens separating them. You might see some domain names with one hyphen in the top ten, but Google tends to rank domains with hyphens lower than domains without hyphens.

Keep It Short
The optimum character length for a domain name including the "www." and the ".com" is 11 to 16 characters. That sounds odd and it doesn't leave you with much room but the research suggests this. Google tends to rank short domain names higher.

Register a Dot Com
Google tends to rank ".com" domain names higher than the other domain name extensions such as ".net," ".org," ".edu," ".us," ".biz," ".info" and ".name."

Include WWW
Google tends to rank domain names that include "www" higher than domain names that don't include it. Include the "www" in your URL when you are doing your link trade request or in the resource box of your article submissions.

Put a Forward Slash at the End of the URL
Google tends to rank URLs that have a forward slash "/" at the end higher in their search results pages than URLs that don't have it. When you trade links with other websites or you put your domain in an article resource box, remember to include the forward slash at the end.
Any ideas??

Wow, those were cool tips.

Doesn't having the forward slash at the end mean that its a directory we are refferring to? Like http://free.ipdz.com/ntek/products/ is pointing to the index page in the products folder. That means this is going to be preffered over something like http://free.ipdz.com/ntek/products.html

I think the forward slash after the domain is what is important!
www.domain.com is a domain which may or may not have usefull information on it but
www.domain.com/ looks like the url refers to a specific page on a website which prpbably hase useful information on it.

Beyond the domain, I don't think that the trailing slash is helpful.

These are very good tips but one thing to note, domains with hyphens or underscores will rank lower than without!

vujsa

Trailing slash is also beneficial for the browsers, otherwise, if you gave it the address www.astahost.com without the trailing slash, it's going to add the protocol http:// and it's going to add the trailing slash, which is not cool when you could have been efficient in the first place, it'll save a few processing cycles so your browser does not need to do this.

Other than this, well, just be efficient, don't take too many short cuts, I see a lot of problems arise from trying to cut corners.

Cheers,

MC

Wow those are usefull, never though about things like that before lol, but I certainly do now (will have to go and check my site for this).

Thanks!

Interesting tips and quite useful, but I just want to ask you one thing, where did you get this information from? Because the www and no www in front of your domain sounds quite unreal for me Today, who cares if you have www or no www, maybe people like to use subdomains instead? or is it really true? :/

Quatrux, i had collected this information from stracture of Searching Machine and google servers using that today it realy works, i have MSI and MSP certificate you can trust me, there is big diffrence between www and no www may be you cannot feel it, but believe me if u cant feel it, it doesnt mean that its not the true,
Do you know diffrence between request of www.myhost.com and myhost.com?? please if u dont know look in DNS servers sracture books and you can easly find answer to your question i believe!!
some servers cannot understan your request to domain without WWW but it think at now time there is a little part of it working!!! but any way you can use that tip and Google realy give higher rank for that!!

Recently there's been a problem with having both www and non-www versions of your site working together, specially for Google Pagerank which is known to split your ranking over the www and non-www versions. That means these two might get two different pageranks based on the inbound links to either. Better solution is to maintain only a non-www version, so all inbound links point to that.

^^
I also have the same opinion, Google and other search engines giveg good value to links that you get from so called "social web".Like social bookmarking services like del.icio.us

If some one saves pages without www. it will be considerd to point to another location.

I really don't know where you got your statistics from or how did you research this, but I know you have got one thing wrong, and I'm 100% sure of it.

You said that .com domains will rank better than .edu - reality check man, NEVER. Simple fact that you can't just register .edu domain, but you actually have to be legal educational institution is reason enough for search engines to see .edu domain as authority compared to .com name - thus it will always rank higher. Also, when you do a research for your new project, if there are a lot of .edu or .gov webpages coming up in the search results, don't bother, give up and move to something else, you will never be able to rank well no matter how SEO smart you are.

With that said, if you made a basic mistake as that in your research, I have no choice but to question your entire article.

Hi,

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