Technical SEO

 

Domain names and their influence on SEO

We often get questions from people asking about the influence of domain names on SEO. Is there any relation at all? Does it help to include keywords like product names in your domain name? Is the influence of domain names different per location? And what’s the use of using more than one domain name for a site? In this article, we’ll answer all these questions and more.

What’s a domain name?

Let’s start from the beginning. A domain name is an alias. It’s a convenient way to point people to that specific spot on the internet where you’ve built your website.

Domain names are generally used to identify one or more IP addresses. For us, our domain name is yoast.com.

Note that we deliberately included “.com” here, where others might disagree with that. We think the most common uses of the word “domain name” include that top-level domain. 

On a side note, if you’ve been on the internet for a while now, you may notice that websites back in the day used to have the “www” prefix before the domain name. So for Yoast that would be www.yoast.com. In this case, the domain name is still yoast.com, while www is the subdomain. These days people don’t add the “www” before the domain name anymore. It’s unnecessary, it makes your URL long, and frankly, nobody uses the term “world wide web” anymore.

Top-level domain (TLD)

Where “yoast” is obviously our brand, the “.com” bit of our domain name is called TLD (or top-level domain). In the early days of the internet:

• .com was intended for US companies,
• .org for non-profit organizations,
• .edu for schools and universities and
• .gov for government websites.

But this is from 1985. Things have changed quite a bit since then. For the Netherlands, we use .nl. But lots of companies are using .com for when the .nl domain name was already taken.

These days, TLDs like .guru and .pro are available. Automattic bought .blog in 2015. And what about .pizza? But these are not all. You can find all kinds of TLDs now. Many tech startups and SaaS companies are choosing .io as their TLD instead of the more “traditional” ones like .com or .net.

The list of available TLDs is updated and maintained by the IANA – the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority – which you can find here. We call this kind of TLD generic TLDs.