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The process of search engine optimisation starts long before a new site goes live. In fact, selecting the domain name itself could have serious implications for SEO. The next logical step, selection of a hosting company is just as important.

Choosing a Domain Name

Choosing a Domain Name which includes one or two keywords could have a small effect on your ranking, but this is minimal and the smallest part of our focus, because we believe it does not carry long term ranking effects.  If you can include a keyword which is relevant to your site, great.  We would suggest for you to choose a domain name relevant for marketing purposes which would clearly identify your offering to your target audience.

Choosing a Hosting Company

• Websites hosted on blacklisted hosting companies are likely to be unreliable.
• Downtime is commonly the major issue you may face when you change to a new web host.
• Google looks at the following for the purpose of ranking in your Geographical Region:
  • TLD of your domain
  • Specified geo target in Google Webmaster Central
  • IP address of your web host server

SubDomains for SEO is no good if you don't have load of quality content (keyword.domain.com)

Let's say you run a business that targets multiple markets in the United States.  So, you create "city name" pages that have virtually no unique content (a simple find/replace on city names). If you try the subdomain route here, the search engines will quickly catch onto your trick.

"I used to use sub-domains a ton for my websites, since Google used to treat a sub-domain like its own website it was pretty easy to rank sub-domains for small terms. I would do the link building work for each subdomain  and then rank the sub-domains for long tailed keywords. Well Google recently changed something to make it harder to rank sub-domains for search terms, so 2 weeks ago I switched 3 of my websites over from the sub-domain way to a normal link structure like domain.com/keyword.php."

"It took me 1 whole day per website to get everything changed over including the 301 redirect work, server dns changes, updating the links within the site, etc. I then did a bunch of link building work after making the changes and as of today I have doubled my traffic for those 3 websites and also double my revenue"

SubDirectories are most of the time a better option (http://www.domain.com/keyword)

Remember, the search engines are trying to rank the best quality results for their users. If search engines determine you're just trying to trick them with low quality content, they'll do what's best for the integrity of their SERPs. That means search engines won't rank dubious subdomains.  Subdirectories, on the other hand, can rank well with a unique first paragraph of content, header tag, and title tag/description/keywords tags. 

Redirects and SubDomains

A 301 URL redirect for googology.co.za is used to redirect googology.co.za to www.googology.co.za. The search engines see both of these URLs as different web sites so you should point one to the other.  If you have inbound links pointing to both the www and non-www you may get ranking weight and Pagerank vote to both your non-www and your www sub-domains. This would divide your ranking weight and Pagerank between two files.

A lot of us lose out on valuable search engine traffic due to incorrectly configuring our redirects.  Suppose you have a website http://www.foo.com and you create a redirect such that whenever any visitor types in the URL http://www.foo.com he is automatically redirected to http://www.foo.com/widgets/, If the Search Engine is not able to follow the redirect it would think that http://www.foo.com has NO contents, http://www.foo.com would end up ranking very badly in search engines.

The major concern for the search engines regarding redirects is that the redirect may have not been established for legitimate reasons.  If the website and the redirect URL is not owned by the same company, the search engines will not rank that URL very well, so ensure that the .  Anchor text, domain name server and web page titles may all be checked for overlaps to help establish if the two URLs are owned by the same company.

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