Domain Masters Radio Show

Domain Registration Tips for SEO Campaigns

Monte: Great. Well, we wish you the best of luck on your project. I’m sure a lot of people want to hear about from your SEO background, some really key tips and tricks to help get your site optimized. And obviously as a domainer and as a website developer and builder, you have quite a few good pointers out, probably up your sleeves that you can share with others.

Jake: Well, I’ll start on the most exciting, I think, domain information for SEO that I’ve seen lately, and that is, as I was telling you last night, IDNs are now being picked up by Google, so we’re having Chinese and Russian and other character domain names that are actually being natively indexed by Google, of course, most of the major browsers support them natively now. So it’s amazing, because I just bought one of the equivalents of Casinos.com in Chinese language.

Monte: Right, you mentioned that, you snapped up--

Jake: Yeah.

Monte: -- Casino.cn, right?

Jake: [Inaudible]

Monte: No, no, no.

Jake: It’s not . cn.

Monte: The [inaudible]--

Jake: [Inaudible] the Chinese characters.com

Monte: Right, right.

Jake: Right, and so IDNs are really, really gonna start picking up with the next six months, I suspect, because they’re all still available, and Google is now natively indexing their character sets. So it’s really cool, and if you go in Google and search for casino in the Chinese character set, you’ll see, it’s a bunch of character set IDNs out there.

Monte: Yeah, that’s great. And for those of you out there that had believed in the IDN character set in the past, as you know, VeriSign had some trouble making sure that those things were recognizable in browsers, they have since fixed that. At Moniker, we plan on having that on our slate to bring live over the next three months or so, to bring IDNs on line, along with a bunch of country codes to help support that, as well. So that’s a really key strategy. What else can you share, regarding both domains and website optimization?

Jake: Well, hyphens still really work very well in MSN. We’re having great success with--

Monte: So hyphens in between two--

Jake: Yeah.

Monte: --words with a dot-com or--

Jake: Absolutely, yup.

Monte: --with a name?

Jake: Yup.

Monte: Okay.

Jake: And we’re--

Monte: Explain a little bit about that, ‘cause we hear a lot of varying opinions about why that works. We know that actually a hyphen can act like a space--

Jake: Yeah.

Monte: --in the search engine.

Jake: Right.

Monte: So go into that a little bit.

Jake: Well, a lot of times, what happens is the hyphens are read as spaces, so if you have a keyword domain with a hyphen in between, it’s read as two words. Now, while that doesn’t seem to help you as is in Google and Yahoo, meaning they’re not keying off the words in the domain, where it does help you is that if people aren’t using good anchor text in your domain and they’re just linking to your domain outright, those words are still in that link, so you get sort of a natural bonus out of having a hyphen. MSN is keying off those words. We have evidence that MSN is definitely reading words in the domain and ranking appropriately.

Monte: And why do you think MSN’s doing it, but the other search engines are not?

Jake: Well, I think it is a measure of relevance. It is one that can be faked, but, you know, you’re not gonna go register buy- phentermine-online if your site isn’t about phentermine. So, you know, it can be a measure of relevance if it’s used properly.

Monte: Right, right. Okay, great. So there’s a couple really good tips on some domain name registration tips.