11
Jan 06
Jan 06
by Patrick Gavin Strategy with 12 Comments
A friend asked me for my $.02 on buying a domain name for a new blog he was starting. He wanted to know if he should buy a domain name with his top keywords in it or not. I say, heck yeah!
Every seo knows nothing cries spam like the old:
www.buy-cheap-viagra-right-here-at-my-online-pharmacy.biz
but I am not talking about taking it that far. What no longer works for regular old websites of yesterday seems thriving in today’s blogosphere. Take our www.linkbuildingblog.com, when the bloggers graciously link to us the anchor text generally used is, "Link Building Blog" see the right margin of Randy’s site and you will see we get a keyword rich anchor text while Todd gets stuck with the anchor text "Stuntdubl". Who wants to rank for that? 
As Andy has noted it has not been all roses for ranking for "link building" for us on Google for our 2005 registered domain. We have snagged #3 on Yahoo and #14 on MSN which is not a bad start and everyone knows Google is a little behind those guys anyway.
One thing about fellow bloggers is they LOVE to link back out. Because of this I think it is a great strategy to buy a domain for your blog that subtlety contains your top keywords in it. Lastly, I guess the kids call what you did "linkbaiting" but move us up or off your list! (oh wait, leave us on, that is another keyword rich link
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Good point, I never considered how people tend to link with the name of the target domain in the anchor text. It makes me wonder where stuntdubl.com would be in the search engines with a better domain.
Excellent post Andy.
I was thinking about it the other day with one of my sites. People always say nowadays that unless you can get keyword.com, go for a brandable name, because keywords look spammy. But when I think about it, when people link to me with ‘Brandable name’, simply because they’ve seen my domain (they don’t even take into account my homepage title), then why not have keywordkeyword.com so you get linked to using ‘Keyword Keyword’. Would be so much better, and I regret not doing that.
Great view on the world of domain names and blogs Patrick. This was the same course of action I took with Blog Search Engine (blogsearchengine.com). Sure, it’s a dang good domain, but at the time all of the blog search sites were named silly names like Feedster or Technorati. Heck, few of them even had the word “blog” in the title.
After searching on the registars for domains like “blogmountain” or “blogavista” I thought, what about something simple and did a quick search for “blogsearchengine.com”
Hot diggity dog, it was available. So were about 1000 other really good blog domains at the time which I probably could have retired on – but oh well, only had a few bucks in the account at the time.
Not only does the URL help with rankings, but also with typed in traffic.
FWIW IMO, hyphenated domains can hurt some sites. If people aren’t careful to vary their anchor text (and a lot of people aren’t) they can end up getting 50 links on their own through trading or whatever that are Keyword1 Keyword2, and then through scrapers, and naturally created links they can end up with another lot of links with the anchor text http://www.keyword1-keyword2.com. With periods and hyphens in the mix that spells 100% keyword1 and keyword2 in anchor text.
Great post Andy!
We are from http://www.pagerank-prediction.com/ carefully explained about pagerank.
Thanks for your relevant and insightful comment, Pagerank!
Gibli.com encourages Genealogists and Historians to make their private archives and records available to others.
Researchers can now get online access to information, which might otherwise never have seen the light of day.
Spot on guys. That’s why I picked up http://www.marketingblog.com. Now what to do with it….
That is a really good point.
When I first started doing SEO, I asked for links all over the place and was so excited to get them – Then I realized the anchor text was horrible. Having a good and descriptive domain does help… a lot!
Ironically some of the most searched terms are “Google,” “Yahoo search,” and “MSN Search” – These also happen to be domain names as well, owned by their respective companies, of course.
Domain names are more important for SEO than ever today (October 05, 2006). The reason is that search engines have had to discount more and more on-page factors due to webmasters and their SEO efforts to get top ranking.
With less factors to rank webpages with, search engines are looking for other things to base a website rank in their search results. In-bound links were what made Google what it is today, but even they are discounted now due to webmasters linking to everything they can find to increase their PageRank. But that is another story.
Domain names are the one on-page factor that is hard to cheat on. After all, how many top level domains can a site have?
MSN understands this and ranks a website with a keyword phrase within the domain name well ahead of other sites. For example, I registered a domain name (american-pitbulls.us) for a pitbull site and setup a blog about six months ago. Three months later I did a search on MSN for ‘american pitbulls’ and my blog came up #1! (Page 1 of 70,571 results)
Keep these factors in mind… The site had:
No PageRank
A new domain name, 3 months old then
No links
No SEO – a WordPress Blog
The blog is still at #1 on MSN today ahead of all 70k sites. Feel free to check yourself, AdSense…
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=american+pitbulls&FORM=MSNH
The full url is http://american-pitbulls.us/wp
I’m getting traffic from Google as well now. Anyway, you can see how important the domain name is in ranking well in MSN. Even at third in the search engine wars, MSN can push out a lot of traffic.
Robert McCulloch
http://attorneycollect.com/
Hi,
This is an assignment for a class and I have to make a comment so that I am familiar with the blog site. I enjoyed reading all your comments. I do plan to learn more about blogging as it will be helpful for my students. Thanks. mjones
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