Online Marketing From Home

Should you include keywords or a key phrase in your domain name or url? Will including selected keywords or key phrases help you to rank better in the search engines for those terms or doesn’t it make any difference?

The above questions are typical questions that I often see asked on forums, blogs and discussion groups. The answers to these questions often go from the one extreme to the other extreme…

So what is the truth?

I would like to answer this question in two parts.

Part 1

Based on my experience, including your keywords (or keyword phrase) in a domain name or url can help your search engine rankings. However, it will not have a major impact on your search engine rankings.

Before I continue, let’s just get some terminology out of the way so we are all on the same page.

http://subdomain.example.com/subdirectory/
      
In the above example:
The “url” is http://subdomain.example.com/subdirectory/
The “domain name” is example.com

Note: Everything after the slash (/), e.g. after example.com/ is called the “path”.

For a more detailed explanation on terminology, refer to:
Matt Cutts – Seo Glossary  

Let’s start with my own personal experience…

I have noticed in the past that whenever I use a domain name, that does not include highly competitive keywords or key phrases, that it is very easy to rank on the first page of Google, purely based on the domain name.

How do I know it is due to the domain name and nothing else?

That is easy to determine when the domain name appears nowhere else than in the url.

Based on this, I have no doubt in my mind that the domain name plays a role.

However, I am the first to admit that your domain name is not going to help you a lot if you are targeting highly competitive keywords.

For example, assuming you can get OnlineMarketing.com, you are not going to be on the first page of Google for the phrase “Online Marketing” (21 million results) purely based on your domain name! 

According to Matt Cutts of Google:

“Having keywords from the post title in the url also can help search engines judge the quality of a page”

and

“Including the keyword in the url just gives another chance for that keyword to match the user’s query in some way”

Source: Matt Cutts Blog

We all know that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be a minefield. There are so many things that the search engines take into consideration when ranking sites…

Even if keywords in your domain name or url only play a very small part towards your site’s ranking in the search engines, surely it should not be overlooked. It is normally only by having multiple “small parts” that a site achieves a good ranking.

This brings me to Part 2, perhaps the most important reason why you should try to include your keywords or keyword phrase in your domain name…

Part 2

Google is very clear about the fact that one of the ways you can create a Google-friendly site is to “Make sure that other sites link to yours” 

Source: Google Webmaster Help

What most SEO experts agree on is that anchor text plays a very important role.

For example: (Assume the keyword phrase of my site is “Online Marketing”)

If you link to my site the best type of link will look like this:
<a href=http://online-marketing-from-home.com>Online Marketing</a>
It will show as Online Marketing (anchor text) 

However, many sites will only link to you using your domain name. By including your keywords or keyword phrase in your domain name these links will be a lot more valuable than if your domain name is something like MySite.com     

By the way, the above linking method (using anchor text) does not only apply to Site A linking to Site B. It also applies to internal links on your own site. If you link to your home page from another page don’t use “Home Page” as the link, use “Keyword” as the link.

Tip: If you are working on getting many different links I suggest you use a variation of your “keyword” as the anchor text. Google may very well see 1000 links to your site all using the anchor text “Keyword” as unnatural and discount those links or even penalize your site.

It is better to have several different anchor texts such as “Keyword 1”, “Keyword 2”, “Keyword Phrase1”, etc. (related to each other) than only one standard anchor text.

Lastly, as with most things in life, too much of a good thing may not be good. Do things in moderation. A keyword-rich domain name such as home-based-internet-marketing.com is good. It contains your keywords and is user friendly.

A domain name such as home-based-internet-marketing-online-from-home-make-money.com is taking things a bit too far and I certainly won’t visit a site with such a domain name.

Trust you found this post useful. Please feel free to leave your comments.

To YOUR Online Marketing Success!

Francois du Toit

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 at 2:39 pm and is filed under Domain Names, Link Building, SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.