MarketReach SEO

When I first started online the choice of a domain name for my first website was more about finding a cool sounding name that included the words “Supa”, “Mega”, “Global” and “Enterprise” so that people would think I was some huge monolithic enterprise with a conference room and a functioning photocopier.

Little did I realise how hard I was making it for myself to get a high search engine ranking.

The reality is that having a keyword rich domain name helps to get you a high search engine ranking. It is not the only variable but from my experience it has a decent impact in low to medium competition niches.

On Page and Off Page Factors

The domain name is considered an “On Page factor”. That is it is one of the factors that you as a website owner can influence when optimising your website. Other on page factors include:

• Use of Keywords in the Title tags
• Use of Keywords in the Meta description
• Use of Keywords in the Header tags

Where a keyword phrase has moderate to low competition (Competition being measured by the number of other pages targeting that keyword phrase) then on page factors, such as the domain name have more of an impact in where your website ranks.

For highly competitive keyword phrases the “Off Page Factors” which are beyond the manipulation of the website owner, are much more important in achieving high search engine rankings. The number and quality of backlinks, that is the number of links to your website from other websites are far more important to search engine rankings when the keyword phrase is highly competitive.

Examples of Keyword Rich Domains

I run across examples of this every day.  In fact during my analysis of the “SEO” niche in Australia that I was doing for this website I came across a great example of the impact that a good keyword rich domain can have on your rankings.

Keyword: “SEO Expert”

The keyword “seo expert” receives 145 daily searches in Google.com.au.  An analysis of the top ten websites that appear in Google.com.au appears in the following screen shot.

If you look at the highlighted line you can see that the website www.seoexpert.com.au ranks in position 5.

Under the column BLP (Back Links to Page) you can see that it has only has 46 external links pointing to its home page.  In addition it is highly optimised for this keyword phrase with the keywords “SEO Expert” appearing in the Title Tags and the Meta Description.

All things being equal, Google uses the number, quality and relevance of these back links as a de facto measure of authority.

The website below it in position 6 has over 7,000 backlinks.

If that does not demonstrate the importance of a quality domain name I don’t know what does.

How to Choose a Domain name for High Search Rankings

The reality is that most if not all of the good domains are in use or have been snatched up by domain squatters.  Still that does not mean you can’t be creative in your domain name selection.

Regardless of what your business is called you can still use a generic keyword rich domain for your online presence.

Use modifiers to create a keyword rich and moderately brandable domain name.

Examples include:

• www.myweddingfavors.com
• www.printedtshirtsdirect.com

You see where this is going?

I use a Domain name generator called www.makewords.com which lets you generate domain names by theme, or with a variety of affixes and suffixes saving me a lot of time.  The great thing about this tool is that it tells you whether a domain is alrady registered or not.

Choose a Country Specific Domain Name if relevant

One again, if your business is country specific then try to use a country specific domain.  My personal testing and testing by others indicates that all things being equal a country specific domain will rank higher than a dot.com for searches conducted within that country.  If you live in the US then this advice is moot.  Go with the dot.com.

Minimise the number of hyphens used in the domain

I recently read that someone tested a domain name with 14 hyphens and it still got indexed by Google.  But it looks ugly and I bet it doesn’t covert at all.

Try where possible to use  a modifier like My or Direct rather than hyphens.  They look ugly and most people forget to type in the hyphen anyway.

Then again if you’re looking to get traffic from natural search, it’s the ranking that counts.  Still a domain with too many hyphens can impact on your conversion rates simple because many lower quality adsense websites were created using such domains and people have learned to distrust them.

So now you know how important a keyword rich domain can be for your rankings you have no excuse to get into a bidding war with domain squatter.