I get asked this question a lot. “If I want to be on the front page of Google for ‘widgets in Barnet’ then I need to buy www.widgetsinbarnet.com , don’t I?”
Now, there’s a lot of disagreement on the truths and lies about domain weighting – does Google give a higher position to someone with the right domain name? Will you be penalised if you don’t have keywords in your domain name?
All I can tell you is that in my experience:
It used to be that google preferred the hyphen (-) to the underscore (_) when it came to page names.
So www.yourdomain.com/page-name-here.html was seen more favourably than www.yourdomain.com/page_name_here.html when it came to listings and positioning.
That’s all changed, and now it makes no difference which one you use – Google treats them both the same.
(We’d recommend sticking to one or the other though, rather than mixing them, for the sake of clarity)
For a long time I used Google Analytics to provide webstats for me and for my clients – and it worked. Great stats, pretty graphs, nice figures – everything I needed.The problem I had was that I couldn’t get real time stats – I had to wait until the next day, by which time in some cases it was too late to react to surges in traffic.
I needed something that showed me what my visitors were doing and where they were coming from NOW, not yesterday!
And then I found GetClicky.
Similarly, stop worrying about where your site is hosted.
Some say that it matters, but in my experience it really doesn’t if you’re doing everything else correctly.
OK, if your site isn’t as well optimised as one that’s hosted in the UK, and you’re hosted in the US, you might not get as good results.
But, if your site is well optimised, you’ve done everything right, you’re adding regular new content and getting links in to the site from reputable places, whether you’re hosted in the Uk, US or Outer Mongolia shouldn’t make a difference.
Another domain question that pops up with alarming regularity is the ‘location’ question.
Should you have a .com or a .co.uk domain if you’re trying to target the UK market?
Well the simple answer is that, all things being equal, it doesn’t really seem to matter, despite what you may hear or read!
If you have a .com and your site is optimised correctly, you will still achieve good listings in google.co.uk
If you have a .co.uk and your site isn’t optimised at all, the chances are you won’t have any listings in google.co.uk.
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