In this article you are going to learn about why picking a good domain name can help your SEO strategy, and how to do it properly. At first we would discuss why having a keyword in domain name is crucial for SEO, and some mistakes that people are making when they buy a domain name. Second, we will have some discussion on buying existing domain name, which is also a very good way to leverage other people’s work before, and how to avoid potential problems form doing so. After reading this article, you should be able to pick your own domain name that can go one step ahead of your competition.
Keyword in Domain Name
We all know that picking up a domain name is important, and our old school marketing lesson told us that for a better “branding” purpose, your name should be easily remember by other people, or you should have your name as a domain name because it would be easily “remembered” by other people in your market.
This is wrong.
When comes to marketing (both online and offline), “branding” is not the main focus. Rather than “putting our name out there and having people remember us”, we prefer to “have customers remember us when they need something”. They are absolutely not the same thing. The first approach is “push”. We push message to customer. The later one is “pull”. We attract customers.
The same strategy applied to domain name.
Rather than using your name, or other “fancy” name as domain name, we think what customers are searching for. And the words they are using is the keyword we would use for domain name.
A keyword domain name tells search engine what this website is all about. And since the biggest mission of search engine is to provide what their user’s need. That means your website, which contains relevant information, will be shown first.
But remember to keep it short, simple and descriptive. A domain name with two to three words will be great and not difficult to get. But no matter which domain name you choose, it has to be clear about your business, easy to remember and highly relevant to your target market. Once you have that domain, branding will become much more easy.
Buy Existing Domain Name
If a domain is picked by somebody before and you know that it is not being used, you can buy that through domain name site like GoDaddy. Two reasons why you go for old domain name are:
- The name is highly relevant to your market
- Depends on the existence of the domain, there may be trust and authority build for that name.
- It is being promoted before. That means they have links pointing to the site.
However, before investing into these domain name, make sure you are doing research. You have to find out if those names have already existed for long time or not. Longer one is better than a shorter one. And see if those names are already indexed by search engine. Also you need to make sure that the links pointing to that domain is relevant to your new website, or that domain will be useless for you.