How important are domain names?

[AboutStar]

My question is basically in the title - 'How important are domain names?'

As I'm late to affiliate marketing, I'm finding that many preffered domain names are taken. How much of a problem is this?

I will always go for .co.uk or .com as I believe these are more creditable, but can I make up for not having a completly accrurate domain name (or one that is less clear about the content of the site)?

Your thoughts please......

 

[Larwee]

AboutStar, here is a thread that covers some of what you asked in your question. It might be of some help to you. http://affiliate-marketing-forums.5...-how-select-domain-name-business-website.html

 

[Linda Buquet]

Having your keyword(s) in the domain helps with search engines and branding.
Don't use long multi-word hyphenated names like best-price-blue-widgets-for-sale-here. com,
just to get KWs in as they look spammy and search engines don't like them as much.

There are still lots of good .coms you just need to get creative. I've had good luck in the past with things like adding the #4 before the KW. 4lowrates. com or 4traveldeals. com There are also still quite a few 5 Star names out there so try 5starkeyword. Sometimes a 2 works like 2learnguitar or whatever. Depending on the niche sometimes adding certain words at the end works like KWvillage, KWjunction, KWlanding, KWbase, etc.

There are lots of good free domain name brainstorming tools that let you add a couple KW and then will show you all the variations available. I don't play the domain game any more and don't have access to all my old bookmarks.

Having trouble typing today, may try to look later for you if you need suggestions.

 

[20colors09]

A domain name acts like a cover of your book. People see the cover first and if they get interested by reading and seeing it, then they finally open the book and finally buy it.
Hence of course domain name is very important. Having keywords in your domain name is the perfect scenario. But now as you say that all the relevant words have already been taken, then try with different domain like .com, .org, .co.in etc
It might help.

 

[James Martell]

6 Tips to Choosing a Domain Name

That's a great question.

I agree that the domain name does act a lot like the cover of a book. My wife Arlene website offers a good example. Her domain name is EpilepsyMoms.com. Here are the general rules we follow:

1.) Include the Primary Keyword - It is a good idea if you can to include the primary keyword for your topic. In Arlene's case her topic is about "epilepsy" so she wanted to include it within the domain name.

2.) Build Your Brand - In Arlene's case she wanted to brand the site so she decided to go with EpilepsyMoms.com. It's easy to remember and very descriptive of the audience she wants to attract..."moms".

3.) Fit on Your Business Card - It sounds obvious, but I have a number of domain names I purchased in the past that don't fit this rule. Now we always select domain names that fit nicely on a business card. (I.e. arlene@epilepsymoms.com).

4.) Grab the Obvious Misspellings (or Pronunciations) - During her podcasts Arlene has a tendency to say -- epilepsy "mums" .com -- instead of "moms"... so I had her register the domain name epilepsymums.com and forwarded it to her main site. This solved any issues.

5.) Dashes Have Their Place - It's a good idea to also grab the dashed version of the (I.e. epilepsy-moms.com) for print advertising -- because some domain names are very hard to read as "all one word". (forward the dashed domain to the main site)

6.) Lock Out Your Competition - I can't tell you how many times I have registered a domain name only to have a competitor grab up a similar name. This doesn't happen anymore because we also register the other two or three most obvious main versions of the domain name (I.e. epilepsymom.com (singular version), epilepsymoms.net, epilepsymoms.org).

I hope this helps.

James

 

[Linda Buquet]

Wow, some great domain name tips James.

Thanks so much for sharing!

PS someone was just asking about your book on the forum today
and I sent him over to you.

 

[djbaxter]

This is getting a little dated but relates to the OP and expands on that question:

New study: which web page elements lead to high Google rankings?
22 May 2007

The German company Sistrix (paper in German) analyzed the web page elements of top ranked pages in Google to find out which elements lead to high Google rankings. They analyzed 10,000 random keywords, and for every keyword, they analyzed the top 100 Google search results.

Which web page elements lead to high Google rankings?
Sistrix analyzed the influence of the following web page elements: web page title, web page body, headline tags, bold and strong tags, image file names, images alt text, domain name, path, parameters, file size, inbound links and PageRank.

1. Keywords in the title tag seem to be important for high rankings on Google. It is also important that the targeted keywords are mentioned in the body tag, although the title tag seems to be more important.
   
2. Keywords in H2-H6 headline tags seem to have an influence on the rankings while keywords in H1 headline tags don't seem to have an effect.
   
3. Using keywords in bold or strong tags seems to have a slight effect on the top rankings. Web pages that used the keywords in image file names often had higher rankings. The same seems to be true for keywords in image alt attributes.
   
4. Websites that use the targeted keyword in the domain name often had high rankings. It might be that these sites get many inbound links with the domain name as the link text.
   
5. Keywords in the file path don't seem to have a positive effect on the Google rankings of the analyzed web sites. Web pages that use very few parameters in the URL (?id=123, etc.) or no parameters at all tend to get higher rankings than URLs that contain many parameters.
   
6. The file size doesn't seem to influence the ranking of a web page on Google although smaller sites tend to have slightly higher rankings.
   
7. It's no surprise that the number of inbound links and the PageRank had a large influence on the page rankings on Google. The top result on Google has usually about four times as many links as result number 11.

More from Google on Point #5:

Dynamic URLs vs. static URLs
Written by Juliane Stiller and Kaspar Szymanski,
Google Search Quality Team
Monday, September 22, 2008

Chatting with webmasters often reveals widespread beliefs that might have been accurate in the past, but are not necessarily up-to-date any more. This was the case when we recently talked to a couple of friends about the structure of a URL. One friend was concerned about using dynamic URLs, since (as she told us) "search engines can't cope with these." Another friend thought that dynamic URLs weren't a problem at all for search engines and that these issues were a thing of the past. One even admitted that he never understood the fuss about dynamic URLs in comparison to static URLs. For us, that was the moment we decided to read up on the topic of dynamic and static URLs. First, let's clarify what we're talking about:

What is a static URL?
A static URL is one that does not change, so it typically does not contain any url parameters. It can look like this: http://www.example.com/archive/january.htm. You can search for static URLs on Google by typing filetype:htm in the search field. Updating these kinds of pages can be time consuming, especially if the amount of information grows quickly, since every single page has to be hard-coded. This is why webmasters who deal with large, frequently updated sites like online shops, forum communities, blogs or content management systems may use dynamic URLs.

What is a dynamic URL?
If the content of a site is stored in a database and pulled for display on pages on demand, dynamic URLs maybe used. In that case the site serves basically as a template for the content. Usually, a dynamic URL would look something like this: Issue 31 - google-checkout-php-sample-code - Google Code. You can spot dynamic URLs by looking for characters like: ? = &. Dynamic URLs have the disadvantage that different URLs can have the same content. So different users might link to URLs with different parameters which have the same content. That's one reason why webmasters sometimes want to rewrite their URLs to static ones.

Should I try to make my dynamic URLs look static?
Following are some key points you should keep in mind while dealing with dynamic URLs:

1. It's quite hard to correctly create and maintain rewrites that change dynamic URLs to static-looking URLs.
2. It's much safer to serve us the original dynamic URL and let us handle the problem of detecting and avoiding problematic parameters.
3. If you want to rewrite your URL, please remove unnecessary parameters while maintaining a dynamic-looking URL.
4. If you want to serve a static URL instead of a dynamic URL you should create a static equivalent of your content.

Which can Googlebot read better, static or dynamic URLs?
We've come across many webmasters who, like our friend, believed that static or static-looking URLs were an advantage for indexing and ranking their sites. This is based on the presumption that search engines have issues with crawling and analyzing URLs that include session IDs or source trackers. However, as a matter of fact, we at Google have made some progress in both areas. While static URLs might have a slight advantage in terms of clickthrough rates because users can easily read the urls, the decision to use database-driven websites does not imply a significant disadvantage in terms of indexing and ranking. Providing search engines with dynamic URLs should be favored over hiding parameters to make them look static.

Let's now look at some of the widespread beliefs concerning dynamic URLs and correct some of the assumptions which spook webmasters.

Myth: "Dynamic URLs cannot be crawled."
Fact: We can crawl dynamic URLs and interpret the different parameters. We might have problems crawling and ranking your dynamic URLs if you try to make your urls look static and in the process hide parameters which offer the Googlebot valuable information. One recommendation is to avoid reformatting a dynamic URL to make it look static. It's always advisable to use static content with static URLs as much as possible, but in cases where you decide to use dynamic content, you should give us the possibility to analyze your URL structure and not remove information by hiding parameters and making them look static.

Myth: "Dynamic URLs are okay if you use fewer than three parameters."
Fact: There is no limit on the number of parameters, but a good rule of thumb would be to keep your URLs short (this applies to all URLs, whether static or dynamic). You may be able to remove some parameters which aren't essential for Googlebot and offer your users a nice looking dynamic URL. If you are not able to figure out which parameters to remove, we'd advise you to serve us all the parameters in your dynamic URL and our system will figure out which ones do not matter. Hiding your parameters keeps us from analyzing your URLs properly and we won't be able to recognize the parameters as such, which could cause a loss of valuable information.

Following are some questions we thought you might have at this point.

Does that mean I should avoid rewriting dynamic URLs at all?
That's our recommendation, unless your rewrites are limited to removing unnecessary parameters, or you are very diligent in removing all parameters that could cause problems. If you transform your dynamic URL to make it look static you should be aware that we might not be able to interpret the information correctly in all cases. If you want to serve a static equivalent of your site, you might want to consider transforming the underlying content by serving a replacement which is truly static. One example would be to generate files for all the paths and make them accessible somewhere on your site. However, if you're using URL rewriting (rather than making a copy of the content) to produce static-looking URLs from a dynamic site, you could be doing harm rather than good. Feel free to serve us your standard dynamic URL and we will automatically find the parameters which are unnecessary.

Can you give me an example?
If you have a dynamic URL which is in the standard format like foo?key1=value&key2=value2 we recommend that you leave the url unchanged, and Google will determine which parameters can be removed; or you could remove uncessary parameters for your users. Be careful that you only remove parameters which do not matter. Here's an example of a URL with a couple of parameters:

www.example.com/article/bin/answer.foo?language=en&answer=3&sid=98971298178906&query=URL

language=en - indicates the language of the article
answer=3 - the article has the number 3
sid=8971298178906 - the session ID number is 8971298178906
query=URL - the query with which the article was found is [/INDENT]Not all of these parameter...up if you have any further questions.[/QUOTE]​

 

[Linda Buquet]

More great info on the topic. Thanks a lot minstrel!

 

[jamilla]

Domain name is very important. It needs to be keyword rich because when you search your site in search engine it is #1 in result.

 

[budgawnings]

Wow, this is all great info. I've been noticing the same thing when trying to find a name for my blog. Most of the good/common names are already taken. Now, you have to either choose a .net or .info (which isn't ideal, because a competitor has the .com) or you have to think of something creative. I think it could be a blessing in disguise, having to find something new and original, or using words together in a unconventional way.

Really, if you have a clear idea of how you identify your site/theme, then finding synonyms to describe that shouldn't be too hard. I think it becomes tricky when you don't have a clear vision of your theme or purpose.