How to select a domain name to help you rank high with Google for your keywords

Most people think of a name that they want to use as their company name and then see if the same name is available for their website. Unfortunately, if you are trying to rank high in the search engines, this way to selecting a domain name doesn’t work to your advantage. You shouldn’t think of your domain name and your branding name as one-in-the-same.

Your brand is the name that you will plaster all over your website so that people associate that name (brand) with you. You domain name will be used by the search engines in their algorithm to help determine if you website is relevant to the keywords that someone is searching upon.

To understand why it is important to select a good domain name for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) purposes you need to understand some basics of SEO.

Most people think SEO is a science: if you do this then that will occur. If that were the case, everybody would end up on the first page of Google. Actually, SEO is more art than it is science. There are various pieces of the puzzle that are necessary if you want to rank high in the organic search results, but how you put the pieces together is up to you and that will ultimately determine if you get on the first page of Google.

With that in mind, there are some basic rules that you must understand about SEO, because if you don’t follow these rules it will be incredibly hard to get on the first page of Google.

The first rule is to work you keywords into your domain name. For example, let’s say that I’m targeting the keyword phrase “horse boarding stables”, then I would want to select a domain with that keyword phrase in my name.

The first thing I would do is to search for the domain www.horseboardingstables.com. If a website is found and displayed in my browser, I know that that name is already taken and I will have to find a different domain name. We actually have a website in this niche market and we selected the domain name www.horseboardingstablesbystate.com.  Notice that the keyword phrase “horse boarding stables” is contained in the domain name.

One of the factors that Google uses to determine if a website is relevant to what the person is searching for is whether the domain name contains the actual search term. If my brand was J&J Ranch and we boarded horses, which website do you think Google is more likely to think is relevant to the search term “horse boarding stables”: www.jjranch.com or www.horseboardingstablesbystate.com. Google looks at the later as being more relevant.

Targeting more than one keyword or phrase

Let’s say that you want to target more than one keyword or phrase, how would you overcome that problem without the domain name getting too long. We solve this problem by creating a file folder in the website’s main directory that is identified by the phrase that we are targeting. For example, let’s say that our main phrase is “horse boarding stables” and our secondary phrase is “Colorado horse boarding stables”, we would handle it as follows: www.horseboardingstables.com/coloradohorseboardingstables/.

 

This is referred to as keyword stuffing and it has to appear to be natural to your type of website or Google may penalize you. Whether or not they penalize you will be determined by looking at the context of the rest of your website. In our case, www.horseboardingstablesbystate.com is a directory of horse boarding stables by state, so it is a natural way to help identify the categories of the website or blog.

We hope that you have found this strategy useful. I will assure you if you apply this strategy to your online marketing business, it will help you to improve your ranking with the search engines.

Authors Bio

For the past 11 years, Randy’s principle business enterprise has been in the top 5 listings on Google for his industry. His list of clients includes the Department of Defense, Department of State, Municipalities, Fortune 500 Companies, College and Universities, and several hundred small businesses.

Today, Randy is using his acquired knowledge to help businesses learn how to grow through the savvy use of internet marketing techniques. His central focus is to take complex online marketing strategies and tactics and break them down into easy to follow step-by-step processes.

Randy has written and published articles on internet marketing strategies to show businesses how to make money online. You can access these resources and learn how you can make more money online at www.InternetMonetizationUniversity.com .