Of course there are several other factors involved with getting
that elusive number one spot. But what most everyone often
overlooks is what I call the fifth element which Google uses
to determine their ranking of a website and that is the domain
name. People, even SEO companies, don’t either know
the importance of the domain name to Google or take the time
to chose the proper name for the website. Most just use their
company name or what they conceder a "Cool" name for their
websites. Now, unless your company is well known or at least
well known in its field, using a basically unknown company
name is pointless. Even more pointless is the "Cool" name.
The entire reason you optimize your website is to get visitors
from search engines, so why not use all the tools available
to get the best ranking possible for your website.
Use your domain name as one of those tools. Instead of your
company name or the "Cool" one, use a keyword phrase, one
that describes your product or service. Take your time in
choosing the proper name. Make sure that it will work best
for your website. If you not sure ask your friends and relatives
what keywords they would use to find your product or services
on the Internet. You might be surprised at what they would
use.
You have the keyword phrase that you know will work. But
before you jump online and get that domain name there are
a couple of things you may still need to do.
Let's say you're the owner of Mike's Bikes and you specialize
in Colorado Mountain Bikes so you figure to kill two birds
with one stone and use the domain name mikescoloradomountainbikes.com
to keep your name in it along with using the keyword phrase.
Now this might make sense to you but you’re not Google.
You're not going to like it but you need to drop the mikes
out of the name because it's dead weight. So now you've got
coloradomountainbikes.com but wait before you burn up the
keyboard use Colorado-mountain-bikes.com instead. Why? Because
Google sees this as three different words and would see coloradomountainbikes.com
as a single word. When people are doing a search they will
not be using coloradomountainbikes, they are going to use
Colorado mountain bikes. The bonus is that your domain name
now becomes a keyword phrase used by Google when it performs
a search.
Edward Biggs has been optimizing websites since 1996 and
for Google since 1999. He is the founder and owner of
http://www.completewebresource.com and
http://www.googleoptimizing.com that
specialize in Google optimizing, and sends out a monthly
newsletter.
