Nemeas Review – How To Choose a Domain Name – Part 3

In this, the third part of our domain naming series, I’m going to talk about a cool tool that is used for scoring domain names.

The tool is called Nemeas and it attempts to answer a simple question, “How do you know if a domain name is any good?”

Well it’s a tough question to answer, and in order to answer it you probably need to ask another question, “What is considered to be a successful domain name?”

According to Nemeas a successful domain name is one that appears at the top of the search engine results; which seems like a very reasonable yardstick to me.

Nemeas is based on statistical analysis and reverse engineering of search engine results. Specifically related to the domain name and the URL. The application contains a database of statistics that allows it to “score” your potential domain name (or complete URL) against a keyword.

A Walk Through of Nemeas

When you fire up Nemeas you are greeted with a very humble looking screen:

 From there you need to input a keyword to test against and then fill the input.txt file with a bunch of options for Nemeas to score. Here’s the input that I used for this review:

http://www.realblogvideos.com/

http://www.realblogvideos.net/

http://www.realblogvideos.org/

http://www.realblogvideos.info/

http://www.realblogvideos.us/

http://www.realblogvideos.ca/

http://www.realbloghowto.com/

http://www.createablogvideos.com/

http://www.realblogmovies.com/

http://www.easyblogmovies.com/

http://www.realblogvideos.com/monetizeblog/how-to-make-money-on-your-blog/

http://www.realblogvideos.com/?p=123

http://www.realblogvideos.com/monetizeblog/

http://www.realblogvideos.com/mb/

And here is the Output.txt file which gives the scoring, for the keyword “blog”

443,http://www.realblogvideos.com/
376,http://www.realblogvideos.net/
383,http://www.realblogvideos.org/
382,http://www.realblogvideos.info/
302,http://www.realblogvideos.us/
323,http://www.realblogvideos.ca/
411,http://www.realbloghowto.com/
390,http://www.createablogvideos.com/
443,http://www.realblogmovies.com/
401,http://www.easyblogmovies.com/
237,http://www.realblogvideos.com/monetizeblog/how-to-make-money-on-your-blog/
372,http://www.realblogvideos.com/?p=123
237,http://www.realblogvideos.com/monetizeblog/
379,http://www.realblogvideos.com/mb/

The scores are at the beginning of the lines. You can go through the data and see which domain name gets the highest score, which permalinks structure and folder structure are most likely to lead to high search engine results, based on Nemeas’ analysis of past search engine results.

Things Learned from Nemeas

URL Structure

The most surprising thing I discovered from Nemeas is that in the following example:

1. http://www.realblogvideos.com/monetizeblog/how-to-make-money-on-your-blog/
2. http://www.realblogvideos.com/?p=123

 Number 2 scores MUCH higher than number 1 for the keyword “blog” or the word “money” (put slightly less for “monetize”.)

This goes against a lot of the common wisdom of using a category/post-title in your blog or other website folder structure.

I used this minimal structure on my Step by Step Blog site and of course it is a difficult thing to test, but I certainly wouldn’t say that it hurt the site’s search engine rankings. The site does receive targeted traffic related to the keywords in the articles.

The downside of this URL structure is at when you look in your logs, you can’t tell what stories people are on or coming to…a minor trade-off though, for more search engine traffic.

Shorter Is Better

If I had to boil Nemeas down to one thing it would be that, in general, the shorter the better, when it comes to the domain name and the URL structure.

Nemeas can help with setting up your folder structures as well as just on deciding domain names.

Here’s another surprising example:

1. http://www.realblogvideos.com/monetizeblog/
2. http://www.realblogvideos.com/mb/

Number 2 scores significantly higher for both “monetize” and “blog” which goes against almost all SEO wisdom.

Summary

I wouldn’t exactly consider Nemeas to be a “must have” tool, but it certainly is unique. The problem is that it is difficult to prove it’s value, put it’s difficult to discredit it as well. Common wisdom puts domain name as a roughly 20% factor in search engine results ranking factors. If that number is even close to true, the money spend on Nemeas, especially if you are creating many sites or registering many domain names, either for yourself or clients, could be very easily recovered.

If you have any questions about Nemeas, let me know and I’ll do my best to answer…I’ll even run a few tests for you if you post a few options that you’d like to have scored by the application.

- Jon Symons
Finding killer apps so you don’t have to.

P.S. 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 actually score domain name (and complete URLs to tell you which ones are most profitable).

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