Should You Have Keywords in Your Domain Name?

Is It Beneficial to Have Keywords In My Domain Name?

This is a long disputed question in the search marketing community, the answer of which depends not only on how different search engines treat keywords in your domain name, or URL, but also the size of your advertising budget, and other factors. The term keyword stuffing, referring to pages that are artificially inflated with keywords, applies also to domains that are stuffed with keywords, in the fashion keyword1keyword2keyword3.com. Instead of going into a lengthy analysis of keywords in the domain name, however, we'll point out two approaches to identifying your target audience that should help you decide how to shape your domain name. In the end you will see that the issue of whether or not to include keywords is not the most important one.

Who Is Your Target Audience?

Who will be visiting your website? And how will you attract visitors? Large corporations that have giant branding budgets can afford to successfully market and brand made-up names such as amazon.com, google.com, Target, Sears, etc. These names are short, simple, and easy to remember, and supported by their large advertising budgets companies are able to spread their names in front of millions of people, and rerun advertising that burns (brands) the names into people's minds.

How Large is Your Advertising Budget?

But what about hobbyists and smaller businesses that do not have large advertising budgets? Their advertising campaign may be largely run online, where customers are attracted through newsletters or blog postings, for example. In these instances the customer's contact with your brand will depend on the effectiveness of your URL. Branding budgets aside then, let's see how we can successfully brand a low-budget domain name.

Selecting a Successful Domain Name

Selecting a domain name is an important and fairly permanent move. Your link popularity and branding will be based on the domain name you have chosen, so it's important to choose right the first time and avoid having to change (and lose branding and linking popularity) once your name is firmly established in the marketplace.

How Search Engines Treat Domain Name Keywords

While it may be true that search engines, particularly MSN, take into account keywords in your domain name, it's important to consider how much traffic that will really get you in the long run. At the time of this writing Google owns about 2/3 of the search engine market, Yahoo 20%, MSN 10%, and AOL, Ask.com, Ask Jeeves and others trail far behind. From our in-depth research of the effect of domain-name keywords on search engine rankings, we've learned:

• Google, while highlighting keywords in the domain name, does not give preference to them, as that would be unfairly shifting favor to an aspect of a site that can easily be manipulated and does not necessarily determine content or its quality.
• Yahoo has been reported to take into account domain name keywords in the past, but recent search results suggest that less emphasis is placed on domain name keywords, which has helped filter out keyword-stuffed and spam-filled sites with low quality content.
• MSN Search apparently does take into account domain name keywords. As an example, compare the results of "cheap travel" on MSN Search Bing and Google. You will notice that the MSN results are dominated by keyword domains containing the keywords cheap and travel, while Google results are not.

Google's Search Engine Updates

2011 - Google has been tinkering with its search engine algorithms, and in a 2011/2012 update they're turning down the knob on the benefit websites receive from having relevant keywords in their domain name. This indicates a move that favors branded domain names and websites, and is actually welcomed by us, because it provides websites that focus on the user and quality content, and not always keywords, a welcome boost. There are thousands of so-called micro sites out there that focus on specific niches based on very specific keywords in their domain name. Some of these are useful, but many of them are simply taking advantage of the keyword bonus Google used to offer for having keywords in your domain name.

Google conducted a so-called Florida Update (Google updates are named alphabetically in the same manner as hurricanes) on November 16th, 2003. While the discussion around this update is long and complicated, the premise with the Florida update, and Google updates in general, is that Google continually modifies its algorithms so as to improve the quality of its results. These updates will likely continue indefinitely, as SEO fanatics find new and innovative ways of increasing their rankings. Instead of delving into a lengthy discussion on search engine algorithms and their technical nature, we're going to focus on the long term goal that both the search engines, your clients, and you have in common. And that is providing quality content.

Quality Content is the Bottom Line

In the end, the sites with quality content, organized in quality fashion, with quality branding, gain the highest rankings because they are quality sites. You can spend your time trying to keep up with search engine technicalities, or you can focus on your content, web design, and advertising to promote a quality brand that, because of its high quality, people and search engines alike will want to discover.

3 Keys to Choosing Your Domain Name

Our analysis of the various rumors that abound has taught us three general principles in selecting a quality domain name:

• Easy to Remember - your domain name should be catchy, simple, and easy to remember. Remember that people will need to type in your domain name. You should therefore take into account potential misspellings and keep it short to avoid typos.
• Makes Sense - you want your domain name to make sense, to reflect what it is you do. Since you haven't had the money or time to make people understand what yabaloo.com means - you will need to create a name that makes sense right off the bat without having spent money on branding. An example would be bluewidgets.com - your customer automatically expects to find blue widgets.
• Link Text - as you will read in our article on SEO Site Structure, targeting your pages with appropriate keywords is important - not necessarily for search engines, but also for advertising - people will associate the target page's content with the link description. The same can be said for the domain name - someone looking for blue widgets, with no prior or other knowledge of your website, is more likely to click on bluewidgets.com than on boobaloo.com.