I read Rick’s Blog this morning about search engine optimization specialists and spammers, and I agree that there is a lot of crap out there. I also know there are a lot of smart people who do this for a profession or a hobby, and a number of people helped me out when requested (THANKS!!).
One thing I took away from Rick’s article is that a company’s domain name is very important for SEO. Rick said, “Want the best SEO guy? Do a damn Google search!” He proceeded to search for the best SEO guy, and guess what returned #1? A listing for Mic Tienken, whose website resides on www.bestseoguyintheworld.com – a domain name with the keywords Rick searched.
Personally, I am less colloquial when I search, and I wanted to find the best SEO company. Guess who came back with the number one result… SEO Image, with a website not residing on SEOImage.com, but a website on www.bestseocompany.com, the exact search phrase I used.
If you want to improve your SEO rankings and do good SEO, it’s as easy as analyzing the obvious things on the professionals’ websites, and clearly the domain name matters for search engine optimization.
Yes, a domain name can help with SEO but high quality backlinks matter even more.
Just Google “SEO” … http://www.SEO.com does not have the first ranking.
The domain name itself takes care of something like 50% of the SEO work… If you do all of the basics, you will have no problem driving traffic to related keywords to your root keyword.com/net/org
If you can’t get the exact match keyword domain, get one that has at least one or two of your most wanted keywords.
Cheers,
Mike
I suppose noone knows but it would be interesting to know the weight of the domain name, the website/page title, backlinks, age of website, pages of content, refresh rate of content, etc.
Here’s my $.02:
1. Search Engines give a bump to sites that have content related to the generic terms in their domain name. I don’t think they do this because it makes it easier for search engines to categorize the site — I think it’s because end users are more likely to trust the “brand”.
2. If you’re building a site, it’s easier to get on the phone and explain to someone that you own “Laptops.com” than “Best-Laptops-Around.com”. The person on the other end of the line is more likely to believe that you’re serious with the former domain than with the latter, whether you’re trying to get a link, become an affiliate, sell them something, etc.
3. The domain name — along with your title tag and some text the search engine scraped from your site — appears in the search results. End users trust good generic domain names, so all else held constant, they’re more likely to click on your link.
I think a good generic name can give you a 20% boost in non-competitive niches. And maybe a 5% boost in competitive niches. A good domain name is simply a tool that makes parts of building a business easier. And unlike most of the other elements of building an online business — like developing good functionality and content, developing good links or optimizing a site — you can simply throw cash at this problem to solve it.
But, never make the mistake of thinking you’re anywhere near half-way to success because you’ve acquired a good name. The name is only useful as a force multiplier — If you apply 1x effort to an online business, a good domain might help you get 1.2x back.
Very true, if you have an exact match keyword .com domain name then you have a competitive advantage for SEO that even your deepest pocketed competitor cannot duplicate (unless they buy your domain name).
This is pretty awesome when you think about it because your competitors can easily outspend you and build more links, write more quality content, etc. etc. but lets say you want to rank for “vitamins” – if you own the domain name vitamins.com then you have a sustainable competitive advantage that even GNC or Vitamin World with all of their money cannot duplicate (no idea who owns vitamins.com – just an example).
Here is a pretty cool tool that uses real time data from Google to find exact match keyword domain names: http://www.domainsuperstar.com/domain-finder-tools/type-in-traffic-finder