Do Short Domains Improve Seo? The switch

[Florisjuh 0]

Well, I was thinking of ways to improve the ammount of visitors of my website, so I decided to look out for a shorter domain. At first our domain was http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ (quite long heh), but we switched to a much shorter domain of only four characters which is http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/, ofcourse there are some easy to guess advantages to switching to a shorter domain like it's much easier to remember, much easier to type etc. Our visitor ammount improved as well, while normally we would be arround 100 visitors we would now be arround 140, which is quite an improvement if you would ask me.

Ofcourse we have also improved on the content a bit, we added an interview with our clan leader and recruited a few new teams and got rid of some old ones..

Anyway, would you think switching your website to a shorter domain name would be worth the time spend on it if you would get more visitors in return?

Edited September 8, 2006 by Florisjuh (see edit history)

[sweet_princess 0]

To be frank, i don't think it's the name that got you more visitors, i think it's the content of your website that got you more visitors.To get more visitors, why not try getting free web tools like a live chat room or daily poll...don't do daily horoscopes because it will waste people's time.

[Panzer 0]

The length of your website URL may not matter for the search engines but it could effect the visitors choice to go there. For example. Wikipedia always features in most of my searches, i cant be bothered to keep typing it out so its in my bookmarks.

[CrazyRob 0]

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/ sounded fine as long as its no longer than 3 words like http://www.yourdomainhere.com/ or http://www.your-domain-here.com/ it will sound fine. It doesnt really matters what the domain is is as everyone else says the content matters. and people will judge a website in a 20th of a second if they thiunk it looks good in that time they will come back if hey don't they wont. so its really the look a feel of the site that matters not the domain.

[trace-uk 0]

to get more visitors your domain name should include your keywords i.e. http://luckily.com/ or whatever.Shorter domain names have less keywords in them (yours didn;t have any) so it was actually worse for SEO purposes. I think it was the imporved content and links that got you more visitors. or maybe the SE's were going to imporve the ranking of your site anyway.

[aka-2 0]

During some time it is had been discussing on what type of domain name was better. The short domain and easy to remember helped to the users to remember and easier to accede to your Web, and perhaps helped the SEO to clear a little weight of the code of the page. Nevertheless, nowadays with the agregadores feeds and all the tools available, this seems to be irrelevant. What counts is the ranking on the search engines. For this reason, to have a keyword in the domain, or two or three is even better. To have a longer dominion with some keywords even separated with hyphens (not more than three so that they do not confuse to you with spammer) works better than a short domain.It seems to be that the behavior of the user is to use the search engines to find the page that they like more than to remember its characteristic name. As far as which the domain name chage have increased your visits, is normal when you make some improvements in the desing. It is more, Google gives to much more importance to the age of the domain, reason why if your previous domain were some years old, it has not been a good idea to change it.