Keywords in your domain name

January 26, 2008

Quickstart summary: Should you purchase multiple domain names that contain your most important keywords? I get this question all the time. Well, the answer is “yes” and “no”. Really, I don’t think it benefits you to own multiple domain names that point to the same website unless you’re just trying to secure domain names that the competition might utilize. In general, the search engines are focused on your content and other elements related to your page so you should focus your SEO efforts here. The words in your domain name can figure into your ranking but they should not be your primary focus. Here are a couple things to consider.

Don’t devalue your existing brand

If you take the time to research your keywords, it may be worth it to secure a domain name with your most popular keywords and then use that domain to promote your site in the search engines. What you don’t want to do is devalue your existing brand by choosing a domain name that’s all keywords and no brand. If you have an existing brand I would recommend skipping any discussion of a domain name focused around your keywords.

If you own a meat market named Bob’s Meats and the business has been around for 100 years; you should probably stick with a domain that’s close to your business name. If you’re Bob, you want to strengthen your existing brand name and choose a domain name that’s very close to your business name. If you focus on a keyword rich domain like meat-market-new-york-city.com you’ll probably be missing a lot of direct traffic when people type in bobsmeats.com. If you’ve been around for 100 years this will likely be the route that people take when they try to find you.

The last thing you want is for potential customers to type in bobsmeats.com and to their surprise nothing appears! After all, this is the business name that you’ve grown and promoted for over 100 years. Why would you change it now just because you’re on the internet?

Choosing a domain name for your new business

If you have a new business and your goal is to fully optimize your website and get clicks from people searching randomly for your service, keywords in your domain name are not a bad idea if you take the time to do the proper research. Research may even give you some insight into the exact phrase that users type when searching for your business. Use this research to build the perfect business name based on the most popular keywords and then choose the perfect web address that contains those keywords.

Make sure that you decide on the perfect domain name

What this means might be different depending on your target market. It’s much more important to have a name that sounds good and may possibly be considered quirky and cool than it is to decide on a keyword rich name that’s dry and boring. For example, you might be selling sushi related gifts and accessories. You could choose sushigiftsandaccess.com but it might be more appealing to cool, hip sushi lover if your business is named something cool like sushimatico.com (yea, I just made that up) instead of the former descriptive (and boring) domain name.

Decide what your target audience will prefer because the bottom line is that keywords in your domain name can help when trying to promote your site in the search engines but it’s not a HUGE help. Don’t make it your primary decision. For more information visit this link about choosing your domain name.

To sum it up; do your homework. Find out what people are searching for and then use that information to build the perfect domain name if it makes sense based on your existing business and your goals. Keywords in your domain name are important but “cool” might win out in the long run. Definitely DON’T look for a keyword rich domain name if you have an established brand. My best advice is to take your time when making this decision because you’ll be living with this name for a long time as you continue to grow your business.

Posted by Christopher Auman | Filed Under SEO Training

Comments

5 Responses to “Keywords in your domain name”

Steve on March 3rd, 2008 2:00 pm

Hi There. Great website - nice to see a SEO site that is up to date, not full of advice from 2004!

I have a website selling widgets in the UK, but our domain name is companyname.co.uk

I suspect that when people search for the products we sell (for which there are plenty of competitors), they search for it by locale, e.g. “widgets “. To capture this, I was thinking about setting up a bunch of mini-sites, each with genuine unique content but optimised towards “widgets ” and linking back to the main site and each other, instantly creating 20 inter-referring sites. I’m hoping that either the mini-site or the main company site will be on the 1st page when “widgets ” are then searched for.

To achieve this I was going to register both “widgetscity.co.uk” and “widgets-city.co.uk” mainly to prevent anyone else copying my tactic.

Do you have any comments on this strategy? The one problem I can see is Google’s tendency to prefer websites that have been long established - suddenly having 20 websites spring up linking to you would be contrary to this so might not have as big an impact as they could.

Cheers for any comments.
Steve on March 4th, 2008 7:34 am

just noticed that my above post has all the instances I have put the word *city* in (I used angle brackets):

e.g. they search for it by locale, e.g. “widgets *city* “

each with genuine unique content but optimised towards “widgets *city*”

the 1st page when “widgets *city*”
Christopher Auman on March 4th, 2008 5:26 pm

Well, not the best strategy in my opinion. Anything that is easy to do or blatantly underhanded will be flagged by Google. If you have many sites within the same subject category and they’re all sitting on the same server and linking to each other, Google will notice this.

In addition to that, your mini-sites will have very little page rank or value so even if Google doesn’t notice that these sites are all made by you, the links back to the main site won’t help much.

You’re best bet is to build a great site, with great content (or products in your case) and spend your time getting valuable links back to your main site instead of trying to figure a way to do it easily.

There is no easy way. Google is smarter than all of us so spend your time optimizing one site and get high quality links (that are located within content ideally) back to your site.

And yes, Google does prefer sites that are “aged appropriately”. They’re feeling is that your site can’t be of much value if it just popped up on the radar. It takes time so don’t try to black hat your SEO. Learn to do it right from the start.

Chris
Steve on March 5th, 2008 5:27 pm

Thanks for comments.

So what would you recommend to get listed for locale searches?

I’m pretty sure people will search for “widgets Glasgow” etc. We’ll only get found for this if we have pages with all relevant town names on it. Should we just blatantly put city names on these pages?

One of our rivals used to have a blackhat page which had a huge list of placenames on the page in invisible text. They were #1 for such searches but I think they may have been penalised by now. To be honest it will probably be searches for “widgets Scotland” so I intend optimising for those all pages with *various widgets* and *Scotland*
Christopher Auman on March 5th, 2008 5:46 pm

You’ll need to create specific pages for each of your target locations. Just DON’T duplicate content and change the city names. Google will not tolerate this. You need custom content –ideally a landing page that’s specific– for each individual location page. Then you need to go out and get links back to those pages - high quality relevant links. Obviously links that are relevant to Glasgow will make sense for Widgets Glasgow.

As you’ll see from my latest post, getting ranked these days has much more to do with links than it does the content on your page. It’s obviously very important to have your keywords on the page and in the appropriate places. But it’s all about the links if you’re trying to compete in a competitive niche.

Oh yea, don’t use invisible text. Google figured this one out real quick. Read my latest post entitled SEO Copywriting 3.0 for more info. More to come on the subject of writing content soon.

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