Optimizing your websites to rank well in terms of organic search is a critical part of building a successful website and property. Time not spent here could result in untold amounts of missed business opportunities and missed eyes on your products, services, message, and valuable content.
And although there’s some thing that you can obviously do to enhance your SEO ranking there are definitely a few that are essentially outside of your control. Here are 5 that we tend to forget about or that we simply didn’t know:
1. Age
Search engines take into consideration how long the domain has been in existence. There’s nothing you can do about this. It’s like waiting to turn 21 when you’re 15 – you just have to wait.
2. Expiration Date
Many experts agree that the expiration date can impact your ranking as well. What this means is that registering your domain for multiple years can be beneficial. For many though the cost of purchasing 5-10 years in advance prohibits them from doing so.
3. History
The age of your URL is one thing, the history of how long you’ve been indexed and ranked is another. Even if you tend on “squatting” on a domain make sure you have at least something up there to show. Give it some “history”!
4. Where
Where are you located? Who are you looking to engage online? We call this “targeting,” or more specifically, “Regional Targeting.” Sometimes this is obvious by the top-level domain (like Japan, .co.jp, or Germany, .de) but sometimes it’s not. Make sure you’re as targeted as possible. Perhaps you need to purchase different domains.
5. Hosting
The IP location of your hosting location can be taken into account as well as search engines can gain access to this information and use it to decide rankings and returns of results for searchers. It’s important enough for even Google to provide geographical targeting if you have a .com domain in their Webmaster Suite.
What else have you considered that most people tend to forget about SEO?
Jim Gray says
wow…would have never guessed on the expiration date…feeling like a carton of milk…
Jared Folkins says
John, what is the SEO impact on non standard domains? I see you went with John.do, just curious on your thoughts.
John Saddington says
it can definitely impact, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively. it doesn’t bother me, personally, that much for my landing page… for our other ChurchX properties though I’m spending time optimizing.