Monday, December 29, 2008

Should my Domain Contain My Keywords?

By Brent Sweet

This depends on where you are at right now in the timeline of starting your business. If you are going to start a business and have yet to register a domain name, then I would say go ahead and register a domain name with the keywords you want in it. If you have multiple keywords then separate them with a hyphen. Also keep this simple, and make sure people can remember it. A site like http://www.this-is-my-main-keyword-and-here-is-another.com is probably not a good idea. The reason I say that it is a good idea is because when people link to you naturally, it is possible they will use your domain as the anchor text of the link. By having your keywords separated by hyphens in your domain, you assure yourself that any natural link you get will have the keywords that you want in the anchor text.

Hotels.com is a good example. They rank #1 for the keyword hotels, probably because most links pointing to them have the anchor text hotels.com or something similar. This guarantees your anchor text in any links contain the keywords you are shooting for.

If you have already registered your domain, however, please don't feel that it is useless. It may be a bit harder, but you just need people to link to you with the appropriate anchor text. You are not guaranteed that you will receive the anchor text, like you would with the domain. The fact of the matter is, however, that having the keywords in your domain is really not a factor when you are attempting to get ranked on Google or other search engines.

This has been proven by my newest site http://www.article-submission-express.com. So far every link that I have received has the anchor text article submissions. At the time of writing this article I rank on page 11 for article submission, but I am not ranked at all for article submission which is in my domain. Since I only focus on one keyword at a time, even against the advice of my guru friends, I will not be ranked for the keywords in my domain for some time. I like to follow the principles of the human mind, since the goal of search engines is to be as human as possible. Humans can focus on only one thing at a time, therefore my optimization efforts also focus on one thing at a time. I feel that this concentration of my focus will allow me to eventually rank for every major keyword I want, and allow me to monitor each individual one. Thus assuring that ranking for one doesn't hurt my rankings for other keywords.

In conclusion if you have already registered your domain, that is great. Leave it how it is, do not form a new domain simply because you don't have keywords in it. If anything this can trigger duplicate content filters and get both sites punished. Just stick to you regular domain and submit articles and such to a bunch of directories with your keywords in them. This ensures you get the correct anchor text in your links, and these are all one way links that are not penalized by search engines.

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