What is the SEO importance of a domain? –

Once you have decided build online presence For your company, one of the most important decisions to carry out is the choice of your domain name, since it will become an element of identification of your brand for potential clients or users. In this post, we want to share with you what exactly a Web domain and what aspects SEO you must take into account when choosing it.

Read on to make the best decision about your website domain!

What is a domain?

It’s about a unique and exclusive name assigned to your website on the Internet. Thanks to the domain, users will be able to establish a search through the name of your website and access your content. Being exclusive, there will only be one company or brand that has said domain on the Internet.

This happens like this, since web browsers access Internet sites through their IP addresses, an identifier that helps to know which server they are on. This translation between the IP address and the domain name, so that your browser is able to understand it when you perform a search, is carried out through the (Domain Name System). In this way, the DNS server would come to return the IP of the domain name you are looking for, and with it, the web server will show you the content associated with said IP.

We can therefore understand that it is a more comfortable and humanized way of being able to access different types of web content through the Internet.

What is the structure of a domain?

Its structure consists of two levels. Initially, we can include the root domain (/), through which this first level will exit. It is an empty domain from which the rest of the Internet domains derive.

• First level: The first level domain or top level domain (TLD), refers to the termination or extension of a domain. In the case of , it would be .com.
• Second level: The second level domain or SLD, is what we could call the domain name. In our case it would be .
• Third level: The third level domain or subdomain, would be what we would consider a sublevel of the domain name. Subdomains are often used when managing different areas of the same domain. The www. is one of the most common subdomains. They are also often used to manage online stores, blogs or specific accesses for the management of private areas.

What types of domains are there?

We can distinguish between three types of domains or extensions that you can use for your web project. This decision will depend on which one is the most suitable for your organization.

• Country code top-level domains or ccTLDs: Also called territorial (Country code Top-Level Domain). They are those reserved for the different countries or territories of the world and are usually used to indicate the location of the company. They use two-letter codes as domain extensions: .es (Spain), mx (Mexico), .co (Colombia), .ar (Argentina), etc.
• Generic top level domains or gTLDs: Generic top-level domains (Generic Top-Level Domain) are the most used and common worldwide. Initially, they were assigned according to the purpose for which they were reserved, according to the purpose of the website: .com commercial, .gob for government departments and entities, .org, for non-profit organizations, .edu for educational institutions, etc. These types of domains usually use at least three letters in their extension.
• Mixed or third level domains: They are those that result after a combination of a gTLD domain and a ccTLD. They fulfill the same purpose as generic domains, but these are territorially delimited. Examples of this: .org.mx, .com.es, .gob.co, etc.

What is the SEO importance of a domain?

There are many factors that affect when search engines take your content into account, and it is shown among the first positions in the search ranking. One of them may become choosing a good domain and gradually giving it authority. Here we tell you the SEO importance that your web domain can have:

Brand or keyword

Until a while ago, having a keyword rich domain, was synonymous with success to appear in the top positions of organic searches. It was common to take advantage of this “weakness” to work on certain highly competitive micro-niches. However, when starting a new online project, it is not only important to include a keyword that helps us to position ourselves in search engines, but also to create our own domain-brandsince this will allow us to be recognized in the medium and long term, differentiate ourselves from our competition and focus on other key aspects to improve SEO on our website.

In this sense, we can mention those known as EMD Exact Match Domaineither keyword rich domains. They are those that have one or more keywords in them, which we are interested in positioning. If the theme related to these keywords is present in ours, it can be beneficial for organic positioning. We must consider some relevant aspects for this type of domains:

• It is common for this type of domains, the inclusion of hyphens, being able to have more possibilities, of being considered as spam domains, so it should be avoided.
• It is not convenient to abuse the number of keywords to include in our domain. You must take into account thestop words«, as they can sometimes be confused with other domains that are using similar keywords. Example of it: cerrajeroenmalaga.com Y cerrajeromalaga.com.
• Avoid strange characters, since your domain may later be affected in terms of obtaining links.

Although it is true that these types of domains sometimes have better incoming links and the mentions can be very powerful if you work with the anchor text in particular, you should also keep in mind that it may be more in the crosshairs of algorithms, since your brand name becomes “generic” and can lead to some confusion. For this reason, it is not always beneficial to focus on an EMD as the main domain, since it will depend to a certain extent on our type of web project.

domain extension

There are different opinions as to whether the domain extension positively affects the positioning of a web page. We can say that in the case of generic type domainsboth Google and users, will better understand what your company does, especially if your project is oriented to a more global reach.

In the case of geographic domainsit is true that if what we want is to position ourselves in the SERPs of a specific region or country, in the case, for example, of .it is, Google will consider it as a domain for Spain, so it may give it preference over other types of geographical extensions.

domain authority

When we speak of the domain authority, we refer to the quality and reliability of a web page, on a scale of 1 to 100, with respect to its competition. The higher this value, the greater the visibility of your website, and therefore, the organic positioning will be positively affected.

This figure will increase as we go working on SEO on page and SEO off page of our web project. It is also convenient to keep our domain free of penalties, and not to be considered as a type domain. spam. The age of the domain will be another factor to take into account, since Google will consider it a project of greater trust and reliability.

Now that you know the different aspects involved in choosing a domain, we recommend that you take into account the type of web project that you are going to launch. The inclusion of keywordswill undoubtedly be a factor that can favor your organic positioning, however, brand recognition It is also something to keep in mind.

Since , we work organic positioning for different types of web projects, and without a doubt we know that a good SEO strategy is essential to achieve the first positions in the rankings. If you want to know how we can help you, do not hesitate to contact us.