It was an honour for us to send our SEO tech consultant and SearchGuru Academy trainer, JianYang Lian, to speak at MYNIC – the sole administrator for web addresses that end with .my in Malaysia — on How The Right Domain Name and Anycast Affects SEO Rankings and Your Business.
This year’s MYNIC Tech Summit (#MYTS2019) was all about “Resilience in ICT Revolution” and was launched by the Ministry of Communications and Multimedia Deputy Secretary-General (Operations) Tan Chuan Ou. The one-day summit, which gathered some 500 information and communications technology (ICT) practitioners and professionals, was aimed at discovering current trends in ICT as well as sharing knowledge on how to stay secured and capture new business connections over the internet such as Anycast and Blockchain technologies.
Along with other prominent speakers such as Azran Osman Rani (Disruptive Innovator), Mohamed Anwer Mohamed Yusoff (Head of Cyber Security Malaysia), SearchGuru is supportive of the aspirations and tremendous efforts of the government to enable Malaysians to take advantage of the digital economy and expand globally by leveraging on .MY domains and Anycast as their identity of choice.
SEO highlights & insights shared by JianYang:
Why Should Your Business Have a Website?
- It provides information for search engines to crawl and index
- It enhances your online presence
- It gives you higher conversion rates
- It creates a strong relationship with your market
- It builds trust, credibility & branding
Why is SEO Important for Your Business
- Organic search is the Primary Source of website traffic
- Organic traffic visits do not cost money
- It’s cost-effecting
- You get higher quality traffic
- SEO brings new opportunities by ranking a wide variety of new trending keywords
- SEO builds Trust, Credibility & Branding
- Your competitors are doing it
- It’s a long-term strategy
How Do You Choose The Right Domain?
- Make it memorable
- Avoid hyphens (if possible)
- Google treats gTLD (ie: .com) and ccTLD (ie: .com.my) slightly different in SEO
- ccTLD clearly indicates your business is targeting a certain country’s market, so Googlebot would automatically rank for that market. For gTLD (ie: .com / .net / .blog / .online), you will need to perform an additional setting via Google Search Console to rank for your target market on Google.
- Domain health checks
- It’s important to validate a domain’s background to ensure it was never involved in any illicit activities (gambling, porn, scam, etc.) by the previous owner.
Why do ccTLDs matter?
- It provides clear retargeting for search engines
- Users are aware of the specific country or region
- Highly relevant with search queries that come with “location” keyword
- Equivalent to low-hanging fruit keywords
- Better ranking performance for long-tail keywords
- Good for credibility
- Higher conversion rates
How Does Google handle the New Top Level Domains?
- Google treats new gTLDs like other gTLDs (like .com & .org). Keywords in a TLD do not give any advantage or disadvantage in search.
- For new region or city TLDs (like .london or .bayern), Google treats them as gTLDs, even if they look region-specific.
What is Anycast?
- Anycast is a network addressing and routing methodology in which a single destination address has multiple routing paths to its endpoint destination.
- Anycast networks are widely used for content delivery network (CDN) products to bring their content closer to the end user.
- For example, if you try to access mynic.my from a US node, the request will be routed to the nearest node in the USA.
What are the Benefits of Anycast?
- Reduces latency, as well as provides a level of load-balancing. Users of an Anycast service will always connect to the “closest” DNS server.
- Provides a level of high availability. User requests will be seamlessly forwarded to the next closest instance of DNS, without the need for any manual intervention or reconfiguration in the case of any server failure.
- Mitigates cyber attacks such as DDoS, MITM, DNS Cache Poisoning.
- Improved performance & security
- Faster response time
- Better geo-location caching and redundancies
Key Takeaways
- You should set up a website to increase online presence.
- ccTLDs are a strong signal to both users and search engines that your site is explicitly intended for a certain country.
- ccTLD should be used for your local business website.
- Thorough domain history research is needed before purchase.
- Your site should be mobile-optimised.
- Anycast can improve page speed.
Download full insights here.
Speaker Profile:
JianYang Lian | Assistant Manager, SEO
JianYang’s unique background in web design allows him to integrate both his SEO and web design skill sets for clients from various industries, from startups to multinationals such as Clarins, Fitness First, EdgeProp, Tune Hotels, Sunway Hotels, Levis, Tencel, Coway, Cigna and NTUC Fairprice.
With 4+ years of experience, JianYang is highly experienced in providing strategic SEO advice, covering all aspects such as On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, Technical SEO, and International SEO. He is a critical contributor to improving clients’ SEO, UX and Web Analytics approaches that oftentimes lead to amazing results. JianYang is also a trainer at SearchGuru Academy.
Wish to invite JianYang Lian as a guest speaker for your digital marketing event or corporate training? Feel free to contact Sophia at sophia@searchguru.co.
SearchGuru also offers corporate training for digital advertising courses such as basic to advanced SEO, Facebook, Google Ads and more. Visit our page to find out more.