Keywords – What’s In A Domain Name?

Sunday, June 5th, 2011 at 10:45 am

Search engine optimization Goals

The domain is my real estate, my store front in the internet marketing storefront in the digital marketplace.

My domain name is my brand and I want it to be memorable.

Internet Marketing Decision Point

There are a few categories of domain names, each with its advantages. Types of names are:

Brands – A known product, or a unique brand you are specifically interested in promoting. Tide.com and Folgers.com are examples of brand name domains.
Business Names – Same idea as a brand name. A well-known business that people will search for by name. Ford.com, Google.com, Amazon.com are all examples of business name domains.
The distinction between brand and business domains is not terribly important. People searching online for Ford.com are looking by a well-known name. They may be looking for a product, like a Mustang, or a press-release about the company’s social or environmental policies.
Keyword Domains – domains that attempt to match the search terms entered. For example, trainyourdog.com. Or, a great example internetmarketingsearchengine.org!

Keyword Domains vs. Brand Domains

Since my web site targets a niche market, I’ve decided on a keyword domain.

Matt Cutts, of the Google Search Quality group, talks about the pros and cons of brand name domains and keyword domains. He also talks about how Google weights ranking today for these domain name types.

Google Ranks and Weights

He says that Google constantly looks at ranking and weights it gives to keyword domains as a response to complaints that it currently favors keyword domains. They have considered “turning the knob down” in the algorithm, so that given two domains, the keyword-rich domain name would not help as much.