There’s an ongoing debate as to how many years a business should register its domain name. Here is a simple breakdown to use as a guide.

1 Year

A one year domain registration is typical of bloggers, businesses, and private individuals in scenarios such as these:

• You don’t have a lot of money
• You want to try something and see how it goes before making a longterm commitment
• You already own many domain names and you just wanted to get that one extra one

Many SEO experts believe that Google actually factors in the number of years you registered your domain name. There are of course other factors such as visibility of the address and how that address is associated with other domains, and so on. But let’s just consider the number of years for now.

If the number of years of domain name registration is a factor, it would follow that a one year registration is not a good idea for most businesses. How serious can your business be if you only intend for your website to be around for less than a year? In fact, in the past, I have actually stayed away from hosting companies that had domain name registrations that were fairly close to their expiration dates. Yes, I absolutely check that info out before committing to a 2-3 year web hosting plan. If they company doesn’t intend to be around next year, why would I pre-pay for the 3 year plan?!

2 Years

Two years is more of standard among real businesses and I suggest at least a 2 year registration for companies. From an SEO perspective, this is the minimum you should register as far as I’m concerned. It could be that one factor of 200 that helps bring your website to a better ranking.

5 Years

This shows that you plan to be around for some time to come and it represents a good initiative on your part. It’s a good middle ground between one and ten years.

10 Years

The 10-year domain name registration period is indicative of you representing a hardcore company that plans to be in business for a long time. Some people think that paying for so many years in advance is a waste of money because prices may go down, and for other similar reasons. I disagree. If you run a serious business, the cost of a 10 year registration is negligible and you don’t have to worry about it for a long time. Just make sure you keep the contact information up-to-date so that when it does come time to renew, you get the renewal email.

The 2 Types of Webpages

In the SEO training program that I developed and in the work I do for clients, I divide webpages into 2 main types: Content pages and Non-content pages.

Content: Content pages are those which you actively target. Sometimes these are referred to as landing pages.

Non-Content: Non-content pages are just that – pages where the SEO aspect is not important because they aren’t directly targeting search engine results pages, so they lack fully optimized text and images.

What’s the Dividing Factor?

Logically, there will be some overlap but overall the content will differ. As such, each page should be optimized differently. How do you know if a page is a content or non-content page? Content pages typically require some form of keyword analysis. During the early stages of the SEO process, a keyword analysis must be done for each page (yes, each page of your website should be individually analyzed on a one-by-one basis). The pages that are targeted will be the content pages.

Finally, on a general scale, every single page of your website should be optimized in some way. Don’t ignore the other factors (like HTML tag optimization, etc) on non-content pages just because you don’t do a keyword analysis for them.

Links Pointing into Your Website

If there is a link on another website pointing into yours, the search engine spider will follow it from their website to yours. Once the spider follows that link, it will see that your site exists and add it to its database (after all, Google is really one giant searchable database). To get a website or webpage indexed faster, you should make sure that there are several links on other websites or other pages within the same website for Google to find and follow. So, if you have a new page on your website or have changed the content of a given webpage, make sure links are pointing into it!

I have achieved top 10 rankings among millions of results for a competitive keyword term within 24 hours (possibly an Internet record!) after starting from scratch. Admittedly, this is not common for most websites but it can happen. I find that as Google gets more stringent and more competitors arise, it becomes more difficult to get this type of quick result for competitive terms.

Website Size

The size of your website can have an effect on getting into Google. If you launch a small business website with, say 15 pages, chances are good that if Google can find one page within the site, it will easily find the rest and list all of the pages within your site in a short time. That “short time” can be anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.

If you have a large website with thousands of pages, it could take weeks for Google to visit and process every single page. If you have an established website with thousands of pages, Google’s spiders may take 3 months to re-visit all of the pages on the site. If you have an important change that you want listed, it’s best to get some worthwhile links from other pages and websites.

Initial Hosting

Another factor is when your hosting was set-up. You can have a domain name registered for years without a website but within a few days of setting up hosting, Google will often visit and index what’s there. In many cases, even using the default page that the hosting company provides (with messages like “Click here for the best hosting” or “This website is hosted by Company ABC”) can get listed. Sometimes these pages actually get into the search engine results pages. I’m not convinced that they are long lasting listings, though.

The Popularity Issue

I’ve had a few experiences where I had written an article which received mild but acceptable traffic for several years. When a story broke on TV that related to the article and I was among the only ones to have written about the now hot topic, there was a gigantic flood of traffic to the article. In those cases, I found that Google was indexing the page in question several times per hour as I adjusted content during the day to bring in even more traffic and capitalize on the media attention. In most cases, this was not due to links coming in from bloggers who found out about the story and linked to the page, or a similar surge of inbound links. This is a very rare occurence for most people but it was very interesting anecdotaly.