Domain names and their impact on SEO • Yoast

We often get questions from people asking about the influence of domain names on SEO. Is there any connection at all? Does it help to include keywords like product names in your domain name? Is the influence of domain names different by location? And what is the point of using more than one domain name for a website? In this article we will answer all these questions and more.

What is 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 particular place on the internet where you’ve built your website.

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

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

On the one hand, if you’ve been on the Internet for a while now, you may have noticed that websites used to have the “www” prefix in front of the domain name. So for Yoast it would be www.yoast.com. In this case the domain name is still yoast.comwhile www is the subdomain. Nowadays, people no longer add the “www” before the domain name. It’s unnecessary, it makes your URL long, and frankly, no one uses the term “world wide web” anymore.

Top Level Domain (TLD)

Where “yoast” is of course our trademark, the “.com” part of our domain name is called TLD (or Top Level Domain). In the early days of the Internet:

• .com was intended for US...