Part 1 of How To Pick A Good Website Domain Name That Will Dominate Search Engine Rankings Video
(edit to video – You don’t have to pay for credit cards of course, but you do have to pay interest if you don’t pay them off each month, that’s why credit card companies have big payouts on their affiliate programs.)
Part 2 of How To Pick A Good Website Domain Name That Will Dominate Search Engine Rankings Video
Its important to put some time into thinking up a domain name for your business, blog, forum, or seo project. Your domain name is a big factor in how highly you will be able to rank in search engines(search engine traffic is the most valuable and highest converting kind of traffic there is), the perceived value and credibility of your content and product(which determines how much people will pay for it and how many will buy), your click through rate(ctr) and quality score in Google Adwords and how much you will pay for each click(people click on ads with domain names that have the keywords they were searching for in them which gives them a much higher CTR and therefore adwords quality score), and the rate at which people will remember your domain name and return to your site or come to it in the first place. All of the aforementioned things will effect how much money your website will make. If you don’t pick a good one your business will suffer, so think of a few good names and ask your friends what they think is the best one before you settle on your final choice.
If you do some searches on google, you’ll notice that many of the top 10 domains ranking for the top 10 results for just about every short tail keyword are the homepage of the domains, they mostly all have the keyword in their domain name or part of the keyword(many times the first part of the domain names listed is the keyword that you search for), and they always have the keyword in the title of their homepage. This tells us that google likes to rank sites for the keywords in their domain name as it usually is a very good indicator of what the site is about and therefore is the most relevant to the keyword being search for.
In the above videos there are examples on the keywords ‘web hosting’ and ‘credit cards’ because they are the main keywords for two very high profit niches, and they have enough competitors in them to be able to see trends in the Google ranking algorithm. They are also niches that anyone can compete in as all you have to do is promote affiliate products for them(just about all big web hosting companies have affiliate programs, and there are lots of credit card affiliate offers to promote just search google for ‘credit card affiliate’ or ‘credit card affiliate program’s’). All you have to do is buy a domain name that targets a medium or low search volume keyword(found via the Google Keyword Tool, I consider any keyword that gets over 1,000 searches per month to be medium volume), make sure the keyword you are targeting isn’t too competitive and has subpages and domains that are PageRank 4 or lower being listed in the top 10 results(this tells you that it will be easy to rank for), install wordpress with 1 click through your host, write 5 to 10 posts/articles that are 300 to 500 words long and put them as posts on the blog, get some backlinks, and in a couple weeks to a couple months you will be ranking in the top 10 and potentially making yourself a decent income from the information product you are selling and or the affiliate offer you are promoting.
Attributes Of A Good Domain Name
1)A good domain name should target one high search volume keyword(and only one) in your niche. For example, WebHostingGeeks.com targets ‘Web Hosting’(and its #2 for one of the most profitable keywords in the world, ‘web hosting’). You can find high volume search terms by using the google keyword tool(search for a short tail keyword, sort by ‘exact match’, look at how much monthly search volume it has- anything over 1000 is good, and click the column that shows how much people are paying per click to see if its a profitable niche). Ideally your domain name should be the high search volume keyword you want to rank for, but if its taken just tack a word onto the end of it like ‘guide’ ‘tips’ ‘free’ ‘book’ ‘forum’ ‘guru’ or anything else you want that sounds good.
2)The first part of the name should be the high search volume keyword you want to rank for, or it can be the last part. This will really help your seo, and your google adwords quality score if you plan to buy traffic to your product pitch page or affiliate product pitch page(and if you don’t have a product you should have one, digital information products are easy to make). It will also help people remember you when they think of your topic, because say for example they need web hosting, they’ll think ‘web hosting geeks dot com’.
3)Set the first part of the ‘title’ of your homepage to the high level search term in your domain name. By title, I mean the title tag in your html. This is very important for SEO.
4)If the domain name you want is taken, try the .org/.net/.me/.us version, or add a word on the end of it like “free” “how to” “guide” “geeks” “guys”, just a short word that will add brand not hurt the seo.
5)When other websites link to you, lots of times they will use your keywords in your domain name as the anchor text of their link. Link anchor text is very important in SEO, and having the keyword you want people to use when linking to your in your domain name helps a lot.
6)The domain name alone should explain the purpose or topic of your company, so your visitors know exactly what your site is about just by looking at the domain name. For example if you want to do a review of a product have your domain name be something like Blog Mastermind Review rather than Alice’s Review World. This will also help with seo and your search engine rankings.
7)It should be short and catchy. Its hard to remember long domain names.
8)If you ever need to use a dash between words in your domain name, only do it for a .com and only use one.
9)Only use .com/.net/.org (.info, .me, .us should only be used for SEO sites only, or as a last resort).
10)Domain names should be easy to spell, easy to say out loud, and catchy.
11)Try to make the words in your domain start with the same letter. Like MaverickMoneyMakers. It makes it easy to remember and its catchy.
12)It should be easy to type in. For example you can type facebook with one hand, try typing ‘face’ right now and see what I mean. When people are sitting at the desk at work and get bored, one hand takes them to facebook.
A Look At The Most Popular And Successful Domain Names And Their Attributes
The top 10 Most popular domains it the world right now according to Alexa are-
1.google.com
2.yahoo.com
3.youtube.com
4.facebook.com
5.live.com
6.msn.com
7.wikipedia.org
8.blogger.com
9.baidu.com
10.myspace.com
Some of the things these have in common are they are all short, they are all dot com’s (except wikipedia), and their domain name explains what they are(google is a googole of in tools and information, facebook is a book of faces, myspace is a site where you can setup your space). Your user should be able to tell what your site is about by just looking at the domain name.
The 10 most popular technorati blogs are-
1.huffingtonpost.com
2.techcrunch.com
3.engadget.com
4.boingboing.net
5.mashable.com
6.lifehacker.com
7.arstechnica.com
8.stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com
9.gizmodo.com
10.smashingmagazine.com
All of these domain names are keyword rich, and are very catchy. Most of these blogs get updated multiple times per day with high quality content, which is very important to their success.
The current top 10 Clickbank Product domain names according to CB-Analytics are-
1.twittertrafficmachine.com
2.the-cb-code.com (this is only because he wasn’t allowed to use ‘clickbank’ in his clickbank product name, he also owns theclickbankcode.com it just redirects)
3.reversephonedetective.com
4.fatloss4idiots.com
5.earth4energy.com
6.fapturbo.com
7.maverickmoneymakers.com
8.magicofmakingup.com
9.truthaboutabs.com
10.moneysiphonsystem.com
These top 10 Clickbank Product domain names all have many of the attributes mentioned above. Also notice they all teach something that appeals to mass audiences. Half of them claim to teach you how to make more money, which is probably the biggest niche there is. All of these products make hundreds of dollars a day for their owners, some of them make thousands of dollars a day, and mostly all they are are digital information products that anyone can create.
So in summary, put some time into picking your domain name. It will pay off, and its a big factor in your online success.
If you enjoyed this post consider checking out How To Get Traffic With Twitter.
For more info, a great blog that I read and recommend is How To Make My Blog. Top notch information on Pro Blogging from a successful blogger who really gets it.
If you have any comments or questions please feel free to leave them! See you in the next post.
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Good stuff Harrison! I like that you’re incorporation videos into your posts, I try to do it as well, it is the future… mixing text and video instead of text only…
From my experience as well, having keywords in the domain name is a must. Most of my search engines traffic comes from searches like “how to make a blog”, “how to make my blog”, “make a blog” etc.
Thanks for the kind words about my blog!
Thanks Marko
Interesting to know that most of your search engine traffic comes from ’searches like “how to make a blog”, “how to make my blog”, “make a blog” etc’.
Thanks for your informative post, but I think a good domain does very little to warrant the term “dominate”. A good domain does help, but 99% of the time, getting high placements on search engine is due to other SEO work like authority back links.
@Charles
Thanks for the comment. Nice blog, I like the design and background. Good content.
I mostly just used the word ‘dominate’ for headlines value (most important part of getting people to actually read posts is headlines, as they say
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Yea you for sure need quality backlinks to rank well, I agree that that’s the most important part of SEO. But having a domain name with the main keyword phrase you want to rank for really promotes people to link to you using that keyword phrase in the anchor text they link to you with, and the anchor text that people link to you with has a major impact on the keywords you rank for.
Notice, BigIdeaBlogger.net ranks #1 in google for ‘big idea blogger’, out of 44,200,000 results. You might consider changing the title html tag of your homepage to something like ‘Blog Ideas – Big Idea Blogger’. ‘Blog Ideas’ gets 2000 to 3000 searches per month, and I think you could easily rank in the top 3 or so for that and rake in another few hundred to a couple thousand targeted visitors per month with a change that would take two minutes to make.
thanks for an interesting post!
I learn a lot from it.
I like what you are doing here. Keep up the good work!
Tina
Great tips! I too feel a good domain name plays a big role in search engine rankings.
My websites name is BlogSEOExpert.com, and I guess it follows most of the guidelines mentioned by you!
I am targeting the keyword “seo for blogs”, and the domain name contains the keywords. (I know it is an extremely crowded and competitive field, but I write about it as I feel I can definitely provide value to bloggers).
It is short and to the point, so it is easy to remember and conveys what the site is about. Also, it is difficult to misspell!
@BlogSEOExpert.com – Yea I think your domain name BlogSEOExpert.com is a good one. It is keyword rich, a .com, short, and you can tell exactly what your website is about by your domain name. Just get backlinks and you will rank well.
You might consider removing the adsense from your site and monetizing with affiliate programs. Adsense does hurt perceived value and credibility in my opinion.
Nice post and nice blog you’ve got here – it seems like you and I have very similar approaches to creating things online. Your new friend,
Nathaniel
You have a great point about the anchor links. It’s just that I’m thinking, for all the top ten blogs, if a person has never heard of their blogs before, none of them would land on their blogs by searching their blog name. E.g. no one would enter “techcrunch” as a search term if they have never heard of techcrunch before. But this might work for sites that are more heavily dependent on search traffic, like the search term “twitter traffic”.
Thanks so much for the blog title tip! I’ve never thought of it before. I’ll be changing it soon. Thanks!
A strong domain name can help, I find that doing SEO the right way can help you out rank others for the keyword even if they have the keyword in their domain name.
@BigIdeaBlogger – The top 10 technorati blog’s seo strategy is more just to rank for as many words as they can, and to have a catchy domain name that people will remember and come back to without going through search engine. They post 5 to 10 posts per day, and they have many people writing for them. When you are running a one man online business, I feel it is better to focus on targeting one or two high search volume keywords with your domain name, as there is only so much time in a day, and doing 5 to 10 high quality posts per day is impossible for one person.
@Deneil – Yea you can rank high for keywords that aren’t in your domain name, but for example if two domains webhostinggeeks.com and deneilmerritt.com are both trying to rank for ‘webhosting’, and they both have the exact same keywords in their title, the exact same backlinks with the same anchor text, they are both pagerank 5, and have the exact same everything seo wise… webhostinggeeks.com will still ultimately rank higher because it gets that one extra point for having the keywords in its domain name(if you assign every ranking factor different amounts of points, like search engine algorithms do).
Ultimately search engine rankings aren’t all important though. What’s most important is that you diversify your traffic sources between many different free and paid sources, so that when search engine’s algorithm’s change and you ever lose your rankings, your business doesn’t die in one fell swoop. But you need a product(the best being digital information products or software) to do ppc or pay for traffic, which is another post in itself
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Good post Harrison. I absolutely agree that having the keywords in the domain definitely helps with search engine ranking, as long as there is good content on the site and it is somewhat SEO optimized. I have spent LOTS OF MONEY over the years purchasing domains for different niches with that exact criteria.
Great points Harrison!
It is so important to have keywords in our domain in terms of SEO. What do you think about my domain name UndeniableProfits.com.
Regards,
Alvin Tan
Alvin that’s a good domain name in my opinion. Target a medium to high search volume keyword phrase with the word ‘profits’ in it, with your home page. ‘Make Money Online’, what your homepage title is now, is a pretty competitive keyword phrase, but in the long term you have a chance to rank for it if you stick to developing the domain, so its a good option too.
Unfortunately, sometimes those harmless-looking, perfectly-named domains may have a checkered past. Before picking up a domain name that may be banned or blocked due to previously delivering malware, trojans, or porn, you need to do a background check.
There is a free Domain Background Check cheat sheet at http://siteriver.com/domaintest.php – just enter the domain name you are researching and over a dozen links are created to domain check, anti-malware, and other tools. You can quickly check if your domain name is ready for business or is still on parole.
Looks like a good tool Phil, thanks for the tips.
Good stuff and I like your details and elaboration.
If you already have a domain and it’s not a great choice, what’s the solution? For example, does it ever make sense to buy more effective domains, create landing pages and send traffic back to your less-than-ideal-name domain?
Hi J.D.
Yea you could setup a little network, where you have your main domain where you sell your product or service, plus a few seo outpost sites each targeting a medium to high search volume keyword with their domain name. I wouldn’t make the seo outpost sites just one page landers though, one page sites don’t rank well in google results in my experience, you should power them with wordpress and write 5 to 10 posts for each one along with an about page, contact page etc. Google likes sites to have lots of unique content. You could link them all together for seo benefits, monetize the outpost sites with links back to your product and adsense, and rank for some good keyword phrases that you wouldn’t have been able to otherwise..
I would start off by changing the title tag of SourcesOfInsight.com’s homepage to something like “Personal Development Training – Sources Of Insight”, with its Page Rank 4 it could rank for a medium to high search volume keywords (just need some backlinks with whatever keyword you are targeted as anchor text). The phrase ‘personal development training’ gets about 1600 searches per month, and the competition for that phrase isn’t too tough (’personal development’ is pretty locked up though as far as google top 10 results go, that phrase gets about 30,000 searches per month).
Also you might consider compiling some of your blog posts into a .pdf ebook titled something like “5 Secrets To Improving Your Life By 1000% Today” (some title that will really grab attention) and give it away in exchange for an email optin(I recommend using aweber to do with, and use them at gamesitebuilderx.com). Then you could grow your email list, and send emails once a week or so with affiliate links to good products. There is a lot of money in permission based email affiliate marketing, and personal development is a pretty profitable niche.
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This comment was originally posted on Twitter