Ethical SEO UK (Search Engine Optimisation UK) from the UK SEO Agency

.com or .co.uk, which one for you?

January 10, 2009

Why is the Top Level Domain important for SEO?

The Top level domain in the majority of cases in the UK, is either .co.uk, .com or .net – but what exactly does this mean? The top level domain is anything from the end of your web address, after the last “.”. This means the domains .com, .uk and many others are all available, and you can register your website as mywebsite.com, mywebsite.co.uk, or any other valid extension.

Ok – but what does it mean?

The extension after the “.” is the country code the website is from, for example there are many available, from .uk,.fr to .de. However there is a big exclusion to these, being the .com, .net, .org, .gov and .edu being the main ones. There is one key domain extension, which people have gone all the rage for, “.tv” is the country specific top level domain of tuvalu, who leased the use of this domain to a verisign company, dotTV. The Tuvalu goverment own 20% of the dotTV company, however are receiving royalties of $1,000,000 a quarter over a 12 year period – giving the nation an additional $50,000,000 in total for the licence.

Why choose a .co.uk domain?

In the modern world, the search engines need a way to find where your company is based. It would be great if we was able to simply put a tag in the meta information stating the country this page was aiming for, unfortunately this is not yet the case. However through the use of a specific top level domain you can target one specific country with the search engines. For example with a .co.uk domain name, the search results from google.co.uk will always be tainted towards the uk, even on a global search. However the real benefit is when a searcher clicks the “pages from the UK” radio checkbox, if you are on a .com hosted abroad – you will not appear in the rankings.

My Website is on a .com – but im based in the UK!

In this case – you may find it most beneficial if you have your website hosting moved to a UK based server, this is the second signal were you can tell the search engines how to rank your website as a UK website. The UK has a range of IP addresses (an IP address is the address of your server – similar to a postal address for your house), and if your website is hosted on a server with a UK based IP address, your website will show in the “pages from the UK” result set.

Im hosted abroad and have a .com – what do I do?

Firstly I would recommend you Contact Us, we have a team of experienced programmers who will be happy to help move your web hosting across to our UK based server. And Secondly, whilst we are moving your website, why not request a Free SEO Website Analysis and see how The UK SEO Agency can help you!

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Choosing Efficient SEO Domain Names

December 22, 2008

Filed under: Website Domain Names — Tags: The UK SEO Agency, Website Domain Names — Jen @ 3:00 pm

Before deciding on your domain name for your new website, it is important to consider the long term search engine optimisation prosperity. For instance a website with the following address: www.postoffice.com would be ideal for a postage stamp company or perhaps a postage note company. The address contains keywords that these particular types of companies would include as keywords. Therefore why not get a head start from the very beginning, by choosing a domain name that relate to the products/services you provide. That way you set yourself out for a prosperous future.

A Chinese restaurant with the domain name: www.postoffice.com is pointless, it does not relate to its line of business. No one would search for a Chinese restaurant by typing anything to do with a post office in the Google search page. Consequently the domain name you choose is an important consideration. Having a website with a domain name similar to the nature of the business, will ultimately increase the click through rate to your website.

Also one of the major issues you must consider, is the TLD (Top Level Domain). If your website has a non-geographic TLD (eg .com) then you will quickly find your website is ranked in the search engine which is most local to the server hosting country. For example, if your website is a .com, and hosted in Australia, you will find your website ranking under the google.com.au, however if you moved the web server to a French host, you will start ranking under google.fr. On the flip side to this, if your website is a .co.uk, it does not matter where your site is hosted, it will appear in the google.co.uk results.

As you can see, there are many variables to consider, this is without going into the subdomain issue, where you can forward a particular subdomain to a specific country. This gives you greater control, meaning you can have fr.yoursite.com, pointing to a french webserver, with de.yoursite.com pointing to a German server.

It is with this flexibility that can cause problems, and URL canonicalization is one of the most common problems which a website will see, and this is specifically a problem with dealing with the subdomains.

To learn more about what The UK SEO Agency, and receive a free website analysis, feel free to contact our friendly team. Alternatively complete our online contact us form.

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