This is the second part of the post about important elements of search engine optimization; you can read the first post here at: On Page SEO Elements Part 1

Choosing a Domain name: while choosing a domain name try to find out a domain which is simple; preferably with one or two words and have your main keyword in it.

Suppose you keyword is engagement rings, if that is unavailable try with dashes in it like engagement-rings( however domains with dashes have a minus point with it, generally we will talk about type-in visitors or when you become famous, people might type engagementrings without dash in it and in this way you can loose your visitor to your competitor ) if that is also not available use some prefixes( like in this case use best, ideal, genuine, fancy etc) or suffixes ( like store, sale, geographic locations like engagementringsny).

Always try to go for .com, if it is available and if it isn’t then go for .net or .org( please check the guideline for registering a .org domain), or if you want to target your business in a specific geographic location, have domains with geographic TLD, like for Australia .com.au, for United Kingdom .co.uk etc.

The process simplified (Assuming our main keyword as “engagement rings”)

Best Domain Names:

engagementrings.com

engagement-rings.com

If they are not available: Add suffixes and prefixes like

bestenaggementrings.com

fancyengagementings.com

Or

engagementringsstore.com

If these are also not available go for

engagementrings.net

engagement-rings.net

I hope this will make the point clear.

File and Folder Names and Site Structure: Try to name your directories with your keywords or their variations, same with file names. Suppose you have three varieties of engagement rings, white gold, yellow gold and diamond and all of these have three settings namely princess cut, bezel cut and round cut.

Assuming that we have all static pages and we have to create our directory and page structure.

Now what we have

Engagement rings

yellow gold          princess cut

White gold           bezel cut

Diamond               round cut

Scenario : our domain name has keywords in it. Suppose we have domain bestengagementrings.com

Now we can arrange the structure in two ways

First

bestengagementrings.com/yellowgold/princesscut.html
…/bezelcut.html
…/roundcut.html

bestengagementrings.com/whitegold/princesscut.html
…/bezelcut.html
…/roundcut.html

bestengagementrings.com/diamond/princesscut.html
…/bezelcut.html
…/roundcut.html

Second

bestengagementrings.com/princesscut/whitegold.html
…/yellowgold.html
…/diamond.html

bestengagementrings.com/bezelcut/whitegold.html
…/yellowgold.html
…/diamond.html

bestengagementrings.com/roundcut/whitegold.html
…/yellowgold.html
…/diamond.html

Third

Bestengagementrings.com/
Yellowgold-princesscut.html
Yellowgold-whitegold.html
Yellowgold-diamond.html

White-gold-princesscut.html
White-gold-bezelcut.html
White-gold-roundcut.html

Diamond-princesscut.html
Diamond-bezelcut.html
Diamond-roundcut.html

Or just the reverse order (however proximity and order must be kept in mind, more on this in coming posts), but as the number of product increases this structure becomes clumsy and very hard to manage.

Things to keep in mind is, remain near to home page, the more clicks it needs to reach a page from the home page, the less importance it receives, so a page reachable within a click receive more importance in comparison to a page which needs two or more clicks to reach.

Name your directories and pages in lower case and use hyphens if the names become too big and confusing.

Name your images correctly using hyphens, it will also benefit you in search engine image searches and can bring some extra amount of traffic to your website.

Special Formatting Tags: Use special tags like bold, italic, underlined and in different colors for your keywords in the body copy to emphasize importance to your keywords, for making your keyword bold use instead of for giving more value to the keyword.

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