Domains

Rise Local’s domain control solutions give company stakeholders proper ownership and total control of their domain. Nobody wants to end up with a domain that fails to be renewed, gets hacked, or costs the brand millions from improper search indexation or hosting downtime. Don’t know what privacy protection is for, DKIM settings, or what SPF or MX records are set up? We do!

Choosing a Domain Name

When it comes to choosing a new domain you should always consider the best practices for SEO. You want as short a domain as possible. You also might want to consider a different TLD than just a .com or a .net domain. There are many options to consider and some of the new TLDs (Top Level Domains) have great relevance to searchers.

When it comes to choosing an SEO-optimized domain, most of the time businesses choose a domain name that matches your business name or your brand name. That isn’t always the case though. Sometimes brands choose to create domains based on the product they sell or the keywords that represent the problem they solve.  Similarly, you might want to brand your online business with something more appropriate and keep the business name in the background. How a domain reads to a user is a really big deal when it comes to domain SEO.

For a local business, it makes sense to register a domain name that matches the brick-and-mortar business. The keywords in the domain can also have an impact on search visibility. In September of 2012 Google had an algorithmic update for “exact match domains” that deprecated the value of having keywords in the domain name. Of course, this has a lesser impact on companies that have names such as “Dallas Transmission Repair.” We can tell you when search engine results pages (SERPs) uses see keywords in the domain that match the intent of the search they are doing they are way more likely to click or convert. That’s what we all want! Keywords in the domain name are often considered in terms of potential ranking value.

What is DNS and Why Does It Make a Difference?

A DNS is a computer server that contains a database of many IP addresses and their associated domain names. It serves to translate a requested domain name into an IP address, so that the computer knows which IP address to connect to for the requested contents. The Internet is a network of connected computers, and they communicate with each other through these IP addresses. A DNS plays an important role in connecting websites and computer users. It is important to understand that just like with hosting, there are faster and slower DNS providers out there. This should be one of the first things you fix.

Not all DNS providers for your domain offer the same level of service or optimize the DNS. One of the easiest ways to optimize your DNS is to reduce the total number of DNS lookups and server requests by moving as many resources as you can to a CDN provider.  Having a more optimized DNS server for your website is very important to the performance of the website, such as total time to first bite or TTFB and DNS cache. DNS cache works similarly to how you cache your WordPress site. DNS is served from the cache until it expires (here’s how to flush your DNS cache). The length of the DNS cache is determined by what they call a time-to-live (TTL) value. The higher the TTL, the less likely the browser will need to perform another DNS lookup.