In my last entry, I helped you select your newsletter’s keywords. Now, we need to take a step back and look your newsletter piece by piece in terms of how to optimize it. Today, we’ll talk about your newsletter’s Web address
We’ll have to get a little technical here, but don’t worry, I’ll make it very simple for you. Think of the address like a file name. You want the name (address) to be representative of what you are trying to convey, and the easiest way to do this is to name your address after the keywords you’ve chosen.
For example, you have a newsletter that is devoted to night clubs in LA.
Your main keyword would be: “night clubs in LA“;
Your file name would be: night_clubs_in_LA.php.
If you want to be a bit more sophisticated with this, try incorporating multiple keywords into your Web address. Of course, this depends on how similar your keywords are to see if this will make sense, but it can lead to much better search marketing impact.
Let’s take our example again: the first chosen keyword is: “night clubs in LA“; and the second is “popular night clubs in LA“; and the third is “clubs in LA to hang out“. In this case our file name (web-address; URL; link) would be: popular_night_clubs_in_LA_to_hang_out.htm.
This link includes all 3 keywords you have. If your keywords simply can’t be combined like this, you can still create separate pages (and matching URLs) for each of your keywords. This will take more work as you will need to optimize each of these pages separately but will also yield better results.
I suggest you make the page just an index.htm (html, php or other extension depending on what you need in coding – it doesn’t matter here, it just should be named: index) and create a folder with the keyword name and make it a subdomain. So, in our example it might look like this: URL/link: http://popular_night_clubs_in_LA_to_hang_out.yoursitename.com
Another suggestion is to buy a domain with your newsletter’s main keyword but make sure it’s not too long or people won’t be able to remember it.. ClubsInLA.com or Clubs-in-LA.com. Dashes in URLs are good for search engines (some still cannot differ words put together) but users normally prefer not having them as it’s more difficult to recall URLs with dashes..
So, here is how your newsletter’s web-address (URL, link) should look:
http://your-main-keyword.yoursitename.com or better but a little costly: http://yourmainkeyword.com
Also, keep in mind that .com domains are most valuable for both people and bots. Search engines don’t admit it but studies have shown .com is given a priority over others like .net or .biz.. Users also almost always assume a domain is a .com as that is by far the most common extension. These are important things to consider when selecting your domain(s).
In summary, having your newsletter’s keyword(s) in your URL is very important. It will both help search engines decide if your newsletter is more relevant to the subject than other pages on the web as well as give potential readers a reason for clicking on your URL (and remembering it when trying to seek it out in the future). Until next time.
Shavkat Karimov
Director, Online Marketing
Every problem comes with a solution