Maximizing Your Domain Name’s Usability

In most anything now-a-days its the little things that make a difference, when you are on your way to a friends house and all you know is that they have the only brick house on the block and thats how you find their house every time or when a person remembers what they searched for to find a website but doesn’t know how to get to that website otherwise. So with your friends brick house; you found something to differentiate that house from the other homes around it and it is just about the same with the internet surfer that remembered a short term to search for to reach this particular website. This just reminds us that most humans do the same with just about anything we remember. With web development the user experience is key to creating an efficient application(website) that has been optimized from top to bottom, inside and out. I’d like to talk about only one of the many ways to maximize how users are able to access your web content with some handy DNS settings and 301 Permanent redirects. Read on and see if you have anything to add to this conversation…

In the world wide web there still remains a lot of sites that you cannot enter without using the www meaning that whoever set up their DNS (domain name servers) settings did not set things up properly. And yes there are still a lot of old school www type people in the world that don’t know that you can (or should be able to) enter a website without typing the www. From an SEO perspective you want to make sure that your DNS settings are working properly to avoid problems and maximize usability. For starters you want to make sure you make a clear and defined path to your website, to do this you need to choose whether you going to host it with a www or not, then you must create the path to get to your choice from the both entry points. I chose to use what people are most familiar with so therefore I did mine with the www. You may choose otherwise, there is no proven performance gain or loss when it comes to the search engine friendly-ness of your two options.

The best and most common practice is to set up an A record without the www and have it pointed at your website host’s ip address and then creating a CName record www.yourdomain.com and make it alias to yourdomain.com. This way there is not duplicate A records which can cause some issues with the way your website is crawled and indexed.

On top of making sure the base settings work properly there are some further setting that you can set up to improve the usability of your domain name and website. As the web browsing enthusiast that I am I have come to appreciate the little “shortcuts” that I have found along the way while using some high traffic websites. Creating subdomain 301 permanent redirects that are easy for people to remember such as having blog.yourdomain.com redirect to yourdomain.com/blog could be found useful as well as pointing a subdomain redirect at your social profiles which usually have all different types of url and username structures. You could create twitter.yourcompany.com and make it easier for people to find and follow you. Google does a good job with this as just about anything they have is accessable if you type it in front of the root domain as a sub-domain or is you type it as a directory or page slug after the .com/… For instance: analytics.google.com will bring you right to google.com/analytics. Pretty easy huh?

Do you have any different and creative ways that this can be used in your industry or niche? Let me know in the comments below!

Tagged as: DNS, Domain Name, Domain Name Server, Domain Nameserver, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Usability