Many people say that the name of a website should be original. It should
convey some sense of branding unlike any other site. They say your name
should not be generic.
The truth of this matter is that branding is more developed by how
you interact with people than by what your name is. Your name
can be used to help develop brand, but many smart webmasters use their
domain name for more than just branding.
People take the branding idea one step further and rattle off some
of the best technological leaders. Amazon, Google, Yahoo!, Ebay, etc.
None of these sites say what they do in their site name.
Google is so powerful because it is the only Google. It was a wide
open market. Yahoo! became Yahoo! because there was no great well marketed
directory on the web. Ebay became Ebay because nobody else had a PEZ
trading marketplace and it's creators wife needed a place to trade her
PEZ. (Ebay is yet one more great thing we all owe to PEZ).
Most successful businesses or websites will not be
like Google. Most will not be a runaway technological success. Most
businesses become successful from soft innovations. Small focused consumer
centric changes can help you craft a successful business model.
For every Yahoo! or Google on the market there are 1,000 Door
Hangers.com or Cheese.com
websites which are doing just fine "bringing in the cheese."
Anchor text is extremely important to search engines. What a link says
is as important as who is saying it. When I link to your site with the
words "I eat cats" as the link text a search engine will evaluate
that link and assume you eat cats.
You can't control all the links you get (meow), but you can help control
some of them. People often link to you using the words in your domain
name as the link text (also known as anchor text.) If your domain name
has your primary keywords in it then you have an extremely powerful
business advantage over your competitors.
Sometimes they do still exist!
I wanted to write an ebook about SEO. Less than a year ago the domain
name SEObook.com was still available. It will not always be that easy
to find a domain name, but if you think hard enough you should be able
to find a brandable domain name which is also keyword rich.
High quality directories usually prefer to list sites by their name
vice "insert keyword phrase here."
Having a domain name like mine makes it very easy for me to get inbound
links with "SEO Book" or "Search Engine Optimization
Book" as the link text. This allows me to rank better for those
search phrases, and eventually it will allow me to rank good for "SEO"
and "search engine optimization."
If the domain name with your keywords is already taken you still have
many other options. If my domain name was taken odds are I could have
still got a domain name like seo-ebook-book.biz, but that seems a bit
too generic and lacks the creativity to keep it somewhat brandable while
still making it keyword rich.
Usually you can add other words around the main words in your domain
name to keep the keyword rich words in there without making it overly
long. TheSEObook.com is one example of an alternate domain I could have
used. I could also try synonyms. I just looked and SEOreport.com was
gone. My next guess for a name was SEOsecrets.com, and it was still
available. There are a ton of good domain names still on the market.
- Search engines such as Google heavily weight link text in their
relevancy algorithms.
- Soft innovations drive most successful businesses. It is highly
unlikely that my business or your business is going to be the next
Google.
- Often times keyword rich domain names are available which will give
you a considerable competitive advantage over your
competition.
