Search Engine Optimization - Are you too late to start?

Most people whom I know and I myself, till some time back, thought of SEO (search engine optimization) as an activity which has to start once the site is live.
But I couldn't have been farther away from truth.

Elaborate readings and my own personal experience now tells me that the few most important parameters to stand out in search engine rankings are

a) Domain Name
b) Age of the domain
c) Data Center location

Incidentally none of these is dependent on the site going live. In fact the domain name could date as much behind as the seeds of the idea in the mind of the entrepreneur.

Let's have a look at these in more detail:-

a) Domain Name - Almost all search engines give a huge weightage to the name of the domain. The domain name should be central to the business concept for effective contribution to organic search rankings. Simplifying this, indianstockmarket.com is a much better domain name for any content business around the stock markets than 5minutesto10.com which is the time at which the market opens.

b) Age of the domain - the older the domain, the better. So the entrepreneur should book the domain as soon as he gets a first hang of his inclination to open a corresponding business. In the time between the domain buying at the site going live, the domain could be used to host a relevant blog to have organic traffic, incoming links and page rank even before the start of the business

c) Data Center Location (and the tld on the domain name) - Local search engines rank local sites higher. Let me explain this with an example. Google.co.in will rank a site hosted in India or have a .in tld higher than a .com site or a site hosted out of country, all other metrics being the same
The country specific google is important because thats the default search engine that opens when you try to access google.com.

Good for now, more on my experiments with SEO in the next post.

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