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How Domain Names and Extensions Affect Your Site’s SEO?

When you’re choosing a domain name for your new website, many things can come into consideration, and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) should understandably be a concern. There is a lot of confusion surrounding domains and SEO specifically, so let’s clear up some misconceptions. 

Do domain names affect SEO?

There is nothing about a domain name that inherently provides better SEO. Instead, general domain best practices should be followed. For example, a domain name should be easy to communicate, spell, and remember, so that when a customer encounters it, he or she is unlikely to get confused. This ease of use does ultimately translate to good search rankings, because your website is scored on how useful visitors find it — and you won’t have many visitors if they can’t remember your domain name. 

Whenever we’re discussing domains and SEO, many people will bring up the idea of adding what your business does into the domain name (like “joesautoparts.ca“). Evidence suggests that this will not actually improve your rankings for those particular keywords, so it only makes sense to include this if the actual name of your business includes those keywords. Otherwise, doing so can even seem a little cheap or hokey, like you’re trying to keyword-stuff even the domain name for your site. Rather than a longer and more descriptive domain name, try to think simpler and more memorable.

Do domain extensions affect SEO?

Domain extensions are the endings of your domain, such as .com, .net, or .ca. There is only one aspect of domain extensions that affects SEO, and that is in the implied location of your domain extension. If your company is based in Canada, for example, and your customers are mainly Canadian, having your domain end in .ca helps search engines figure out that you’re a better local match than a generic .com website. Your site is therefore more likely to be shown higher in the search rankings, which translates to more visitors and an edge for your business. 

Aside from this consideration, you are best off simply following convention for your industry when selecting a domain extension. If other companies in your space all use .com to highlight the universal and International aspect of their company, you may want to consider that as well. 

Of course, all the great .com names have already been taken. As we were discussing earlier, if you’re trying to keep things simple and memorable, you might want to consider one of the many new domain extensions that have been released over the past few years. (For a full list, go here https://www.canspace.ca/domains.html). 

It’s much easier to get a short domain name using one of these extensions, like .music, .store, or .club. These will only get more popular in the future, so you might want to grab one now!

Register your domain name with CanSpace Solutions! We offer all the same features as our competitors – including domain privacy, full DNS record control, domain forwarding, our excellent support, and much much more – at only a fraction of the price of others. In fact, CanSpace offers the lowest prices on Canadian domain names – guaranteed! Our price for .ca domains is only $10.99 per year, regardless of the number of years you register for. This price is the same for registrations, renewals, and transfers!

CanSpace Team

CanSpace Solutions is Canada's leading domain name registrar and web hosting provider. Keep an eye on our blog for expert information on domain names, websites, and running a business online.