Traffic Act Blog – Digital & Search Marketing Adventures

Most Australian Search Engine Service consultants have to work with their clients’ existing web hosts and domain names, leaving little opportunity to use these important elements as part of their overall Australian SEO strategy.

These tips are sure to help you execute your SEO strategy and choose your host and domain names with SEO in mind.

SEO tips on choosing a web host

• The server of your host should be in Australia, where most of your customers are, as Google will consider the IP address in its algorithms. If the main server of your host is in China your site will rank well on google.cn, but not so well in Australia, on google.com.au. So for example; you should host your main website in Australia, but when you build a micro-site of your website for your Chinese customers, make sure it is hosted locally, so both sites are ranked well in their respective local Google rankings.
• Your web host should offer a fast service. If your pages load too slowly the search engine spider will ‘time out’ and your site will not be fully indexed.
• Your web host should also be reliable and not have a lot of down time. Even if your site is down when your customers are not on it, if the spider happens to visit your site at that time, the same time-out code will be activated. The total number of timed-out queries will negatively affect your rankings.

SEO tip on choosing domain names

Google attaches the greatest importance to the words it sees first and the very first block of text a search engine spider sees is your full URL (so your domain name and directory structure). This has two important implications;

• A domain name ending in .com.au is a clear indication of your location, Australia, and helps you in your rankings on the local SE.

• It’s fair to say a keyword heavy domain name would be an ideal way to boost your rankings

If you are fortunate enough to start a website from scratch, you should obviously do keyword research first so you can use the outcome to choose a domain name. This ensures a huge head start on Google rankings.

I realise this is difficult for most as a keyword heavy domain name may appear spammy or you would prefer to use a business name instead. Fair enough of course. In that case you could get some keyword heavy domain names to use as landing pages of certain campaigns, or use them as your business blog.

Good luck!