How To Choose a Domain Name - Part 1
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For a long time I couldn’t quite figure out why Google was sending so much traffic to this site for terms related to “art.” While the word is in my domain name and site’s title, 99% of the content of the site is about money, so you’d think that search engines would leave me off the list of resources for the keyword “art.”
As I investigated more, what I discovered turned into information that I felt was worth sharing and revealed some interesting (beginner) SEO tips for how search engines work and why it is important to choose your domain name very carefully.
There are two things to realize when choosing a domain name.
1.) Keywords Matter - A Lot
What’s a keyword? It’s just a word with meaning to searchers. In “Art of Money,” art and money are keywords and “of” although a word, is just dismissed…it doesn’t have any meaning to a searcher.
By choosing the domain name ArtofMoney.org, I’ve told Google that this site is about Art and Money. My thought was that if the content was overwhelmingly about Money then Google would get that it isn’t a site about Art.
It turns out that this isn’t totally true so I wanted to think about why. Then one day I was poking around in Google’s webmaster tools and I took a look at the list of terms that are found in external links to this site:
Here’s a partial list of words that Google has discovered in external links to my site (I assume in order of number from most to least)
In external links to your site
art
money
the
list
system
jon
artofmoney
org
note
business
Then I got it, not only does my domain name have conflicting keywords in it, but since most of the links to my site look like this Art of Money then most of the anchor text of the links pointing to my site. Ouch!
No wonder Google thinks the site is about Art and/or Money, there are ##### links pointing to the site telling them that they feel the site is about Art - Money.
With the exception of the domain name itself, the anchor text of an inbound link is probably the strongest indicator of the content of a web page or site; especially if there are a lot of them all indicating the same thing.
2.) Google is Good, But It’s Far From Great
“Art of Money”…most English speaking adults will easily know that this site is about money. You may define “art” as; creation, making, talking about, thinking about, pondering etc. No matter how you define art, the subject is “money.”
But Google isn’t smart enough to realize whether “art,” or “money” is the intended subject of the site.
When choosing a domain name if you are all targeting search engine traffic, it’s important to make sure it passes the dead dumb simple test:
–> Take out all the small or meaningless words and forget every “meaning” that you attach to the words that would be left and ask yourself if this reflects what your site is about.
“ArtOfMoney” = Art + Money = Bad. Does not represent the actual content of my site.
“ProBlogger” = Professional + Blogger = Good!
“EnGadget” = Gadget = Good!
“Business-Opportunities” = Business + Opportunities = Good!
“CaffeineMarketing” = Caffeine + Marketing = Same Problem as Art of Money
Summary of Part One of Choosing a Domain Name
The lesson here is to avoid clever phrases unless they are really on target and completely unambiguous.
If you boil your domain name down to just it’s keywords, does it 100% accurately represent the topic of your site?
- Jon Symons
P.S. This was the first of a three part series about choosing domain names. We’ll cover keywords in the domain name, domain name brainstorming and lastly a tool that claims to actually score domain name (and complete URLs to tell you which ones are most profitable).
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Comments ( 7 )
[...] This was the third of a three part series about choosing domain names. We’ve covered keywords in a domain name, domain name brainstorming and the article you’ve just read about a tool that claims to [...]
Nemeas Review - How To Choose a Domain Name - Part 3 | Art Of Money added these pithy words on Feb 28 07 at 5:38 am[...] Humans understand word meaning with a level of sophistication that search engines don’t have. “Art of Money” is clearly about money to a human ear, but to a search engine it’s a site that is equally about “art” and “money.” You can read my full breakdown of choosing keywords in domain names. [...]
8 Tools & Tips for Picking a Domain Name | Art Of Money added these pithy words on Mar 01 07 at 11:48 pmKimber added these pithy words on Feb 23 07 at 7:50 amI hear you.
No Limits Ladies is about financial freedom
yet we get a lot of traffic from lonely guys looking for ladies.
Unfortunately they only get E and I.
LOL
Jon added these pithy words on Feb 23 07 at 7:55 amLOL Kimber, I’m sure their finances are much better off, even if their hearts remain lonely
Tyler added these pithy words on Feb 23 07 at 12:23 pmhmmm…I have dividend+money = financial
and nhl+digest = Hockey
the first one looks ok by your post definitions, but the second one may be ambiguous?
Any thoughts?
Jon added these pithy words on Feb 23 07 at 1:20 pm@Tyler, well now that your site is established, not much to do about it, but NHLHockey.com, or NHLslapshot.com (which is available btw) would have been better. But, since “digest” has been used for journalism for a long time, it should be fine, not nearly as big of a tangent as art and money.
Brian at babybiotechs.com added these pithy words on Feb 23 07 at 4:25 pmYou couldn’t have posted this 2 weeks ago?
Baby probably wasn’t the best choice. Small might have been better. I thought about adding investing into it, but then it got a little long.