Last few days I had a conversation with another romanian seo guy about domains. He kept telling me that getting a domain related to your country is an important step in your online success, better said will improve your rank in search engines. I tried to convince him that he is wrong, but he didn’t listen. So I decided that this deserves my attention and that you should know about this. I’ll take some time and write down about domain names. Take a seat, grab some popcorn and start reading.
If you want to start an online business, either it’s a shopping site, an info site made for adsense revenue purposes or just a site to reflect your offline business, getting the proper domain is indeed the first step towards success. Of course, not even the best domain in the world ( if it exists ) cannot do wonders without being backed up with a clever design, a functional site and a proper marketing.
As you all know there are tons of domain extensions out there, the most common of them being the .com ones. Generally, if you know a domain name but can’t remember it’s extension exactly you will probably type www.domainname.com. Of course this doesn’t apply to all people, but to the majority of them. So in my opinion getting a .com may be the ideal solution, especially if you want to address to people all around the world.
But what if you have a local offline business and do a site to reflect it ? Then probably your best choice would be a regional extension. For example let’s say that I, as a romanian, have a business where I sell men shoes. Supposing that I can sell shoes in all my country, the best domain name I should get is vanzaripantofi.ro ( “vanzari pantofi” is the romanian equivalent for “shoes sells” ) or vanzaripantofibarbatesti.ro ( “vanzari pantofi barbatesti” is the romanian equivalent for “men shoes sells” ). What if this domain name is taken ? Well then in this case you can always use our friendly “-” sign and register vanzari-pantofi.ro or vanzari-pantofi-barbatesti.ro.
Ok, what if you have a local business and you sell shoes only in your town ? Then the ideal solution would be if you could incorporate the town name as well in your domain. Why ? The answer is pretty simple : 1. a lot of people do local searches, especially when they want to shop, rent a vacation house, look out for schools in an area etc. 2. search engines are starting to move from general/random searches towards local/specific searches. 3. if I find your site, want to buy something from you but see that you don’t ship to my town, then I’ll get pretty frustrated and probably will close your site immediately and never return - not too good for your business, especially because a pleased customer can always come back. There may be even more reasons than these 3 but I think they are enough. So let’s say that I sell shoes in Bucuresti (Bucharest). Then some good alternatives would be vanzaripantofibucuresti.ro (bucharestshoessells.ro), vanzaripantofiinbucuresti.ro (shoessellsinbucharest.ro,) vanzari-pantofi-bucuresti.ro (bucharest-shoes-sells.ro) etc.
What if all these are taken ? Does the world end ? No. You can always register a .com. So instead of trying to register a .ro domain that doesn’t reflect exactly what you sell or what info you have in your site I advise that you always should look at the .com sites. So instead of taking asillylongdomainname.ro or anobscuredomainname.ro I would always take a good .com domain.
Very important : the domain extension does not influence your ranking in search engines and I don’t think it will in the future neither. Let me give you a quick example, just in case you don’t believe me. If we do a search for “optimizare seo” which is the romanian equivalent of “seo optimization” in Google.ro ( so if the domain name would count, we should see only .ro domains right ? ) we will find the following sites 4 sites in the top :
underclick.ro/Optimizare/index.html
filipnet.ro/optimizare-seo.html
optimizare-site.com
nm.ro/publicitate/seo.shtml
Ok now, why does the .com site appear in a search done in Google.ro, for a romanian search term and more than that, in the tops ? Simple. Because the domain name doesn’t count. So if you had this idea in your head, from now on please forget about it. What indeed matters for a website in a regional search engine ( google.ro, google.co.uk etc ) is the location of the server where the site is hosted. So if you have a romanian site, try to host it on a romanian server. If for example you have a .co.uk site and target the UK market then be sure to have your site hosted on a server situated in UK ( that would be the best for SEO purposes, but of course you can host it anywhere you like and still rank very well in tops if you have done a proper SEO, you’ll just loose this ranking factor).
Hope I didn’t pass over anything and if I did I’ll come back and update the text later on. So from now on you know : don’t stress too much for the extension, but instead focus on your site’s location and on all the other ranking factors that I’ll tell you about in my future posts.
