Saturday, February 14, 2009

Should my Domain Contain My Keywords?

By Brent Sweet

There are really two answers to this question. First of all if you are starting a new business, and have yet to register your domain, then yes, register a domain that has your keywords in it. It is best to use hyphenated keywords. The reason for this is if people like to your site naturally, chances are they are going to link to your domain. If you have your keywords in your domain, this will help with your links that you do not receive anchor text.

A good example is Hotels.com. The Hotels.com site ranks in the first position for the keyword hotels, which is probably one of the most competitive terms on the internet. I believe they rank so high for this word because most of their links contain the word hotels. People who naturally link to them use the anchor text hotels.com which contains their major keyword. When you register the domain that has your keywords in the text, your anchor text in natural links will always be what you want it to be.

If you have already registered your domain, however, please don't feel that it is useless. It may be a bit harder, but you just need people to link to you with the appropriate anchor text. You are not guaranteed that you will receive the anchor text, like you would with the domain. The fact of the matter is, however, that having the keywords in your domain is really not a factor when you are attempting to get ranked on Google or other search engines.

Case and point is my newest site http://www.article-submission-express.com. I have went out and built my links with the anchor text article submissions. At the point of writing this article, about 17 days after putting the site online, I rank on page 11 for article submissions as the keyword. Article submission, however, which is my domain name is not ranking my site anywhere on Google. I only focus on one keyword at a time, even though my guru friends state that we should try to rank for many small keywords at a time. I like to think of search engines as humans and their patents prove that is what they are mimicking. Humans can only focus on one thing at a time. I feel that the concentration of my focus to particular keywords will allow me to not only get rankings for several keywords over time, but allow me to monitor the results and make sure that efforts towards other rankings don't damage my current rankings.

So to conclude my article, if you already registered your domain, that is fantastic. Leave that domain exacly as is. Do not go out and get another domain because your domain doesn't have keywords in it. If you do this you could even get your site penalized if Google sees the same content on the two domains. They have duplicate content filters, which is why my article submission methods are so effective. Just stick to that domain and do things like article submission to a bunch of directories with your keywords in the anchor text. These are all one way links that will only help you, and you set the anchor text.

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