A prospective customer came in to see me today, and right away I found several things in their website that were holding them back from better search engine results and sales. One of the first things that I do when I evaluate a website is to look at the domain name registration of the domain name. The most glaring thing I found right away was that their domain name was about to expire in TWO MONTHS. This is most likely having a negative affect on their Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
You can lookup the registration on almost any domain name by using a “whois” search. A generic one can be found here: http://www.internic.net/whois.html. The whois search result will tell you when your domain name will expire. What most people don’t realize, is that domain names can be registered up to TEN YEARS into the future. If you are confident that you will be using your domain name well into the future, then you should register it for at least three years right away. The reason is because spammers and sploggers (people who generate splogs) only register their domain names for short periods of time, while legitimate businesses tend to register their domain names for more than one year. Search engines now look at this data to determine the trustworthiness of your website. In the case of Google, this data is used (in addition to other data), to give your site a trustworthiness ranking (The Google Page Rank).
What most people don’t realize, is that domain
names can be registered up to TEN YEARS into the future.
Back in the old days, all you had to do was to focus on creating Meta Tags and Page Titles for your website to come up high in search engines. Today, search engines are WAY WAY more sophisticated than that. Even things like your domain name registration can affect your online success. Adding a couple of years to your domain name won’t make you number one in Google search results, but it is one of many things that Google looks at.
