Search engine optimization has grown to become its own discipline in online marketing. After all, the success of your own website depends directly on the ranking position in search results. In order to be able to push your own online presence to the top, the website must be designed to meet the ranking criteria of the search engines. The crux is, however, that the criteria that lead to a better or worse ranking position of a website are not always known. Many ranking criteria are deliberately kept secret, in order to prevent deliberate SEO manipulation. Another problem is that the ranking factors and their prioritization can change quickly.
Keywords: quality over quantity
Keywords are queries entered by users into the search engine. Search engines determine the relevance of a text for a certain web search based on the keywords contained on the website. However, it is not recommended to simply try to enrich the text with an extra high keyword density. This is how Google recognizes whether a text has been tagged with additional keywords in favor of better rankings, or whether it is an organic text addressed at users. The best advice to achieve a good ranking position for web content is therefore to ensure that the content is well structured and informative – in addition to grammatical correctness and good readability.
nTLDs to improve rankings
According to a study of the Domain Name Association, domains with subject-related or business-specific nTLDs and domains with branding can achieve good results in competitive niches; especially in the following cases:
- The user searches for a company name that is included in the domain as a trademark
- The user searches for content that is included in the domain name in the form of keywords.
- The user searches for keywords with high search volume and qualified content, that are relevant to specific regions and industries but do not appear as keywords in the domain.
A further advantage of the new domain extensions compared to established generic domain translations such as .COM or country code extensions such as .DE is that they generally need a lower domain authority to rank better for the same set of keywords. Frequently used search terms that appear in the domain, the domain extension, or the individual URL of a page, help websites to rank better for certain keywords.
Google currently treats nTLDs exactly the same as the conventional domain extensions. The new domain extensions should be favored over .COM or .DE if they have short and memorable domains available. Especially since it is actually also the premise of search engines to reward those websites and domains with good rankings in the search results, which have been made for users and not optimized solely for search engines.