Domain Names - Brandable v Keyword-Rich?
Darren Rowse posted a question on his blog a few days ago asking about how people choose domain names. Do people preferred brandable domain names or domains that are rich with keywords? I figured that question warranted more than a comment so here is my answer.
The Best of Both Worlds
In some cases the best type of domain name you could pick would be one that was brandable and yet still contained the desired keyword. This can work well if your keyword is literally one word, or perhaps two.
However, once the phrases start getting a little longer, such as the ever-popular “make money online”, it gets much harder to incorporate the words into the domain and still be brandable. In fact, I would argue that it is impossible to do that with a domain which is three or more words long because a brandable name needs to be short.
The SEO Factor
The reason why there is even any debate over the topic is that supposedly Google will rank a domain higher in the search results for a given term if the keywords appear in the domain name itself.
I am not an SEO expert so I really don’t know if this is the case but one thing I am fairly sure of it that it is usually bad to base long term decisions on fickle circumstances such as the current Google algorithm!
Unless you are creating a throwaway site (and why would you want to do that?) your domain is a consistent factor that you cannot change later on so you should choose it wisely. Google changes their algorithm all the time and even if they rank keyword-rich domains favourably now, doesn’t mean they will in the future.
Authority v Niche Sites
This is a topic I have been thinking about a lot recently and something I am going to expand on in a forthcoming post. The ebook I wrote recently is about creating small niche sites that are designed to attract search engine traffic - they are not designed to be authority sites.
It is often small niche sites such as this that tend to have keyword based domains. The theory goes that the site will get all of its traffic from Google and therefore you should use every SEO advantage you can to rank higher, and this includes choosing good keywords for your domain name.
However, I disagree with this viewpoint…
Brandability = Visibility
What some people forget about Google, is that even though Google is a search engine - a computer, its users are people. So let’s say that including a keyword in your domain allows you to rank one or two points higher in the search results, what does that mean?
You would expect that to mean that people are more likely to see your link and therefore click on it. However keyword rich domains often get lost in a sea of other domains that all look and sound the same.
A clue that this might be the case is if when trying to buy your domain name you have to go through a dozen variations in hyphens, underscores, word-ordering or top level extensions in order to find a domain that is available.
On the other hand if you create a brandable domain, it sticks out - it looks different! In my opinion, this is more likely to be seen and therefore clicked on than the generic looking domain that ranks a couple of points higher than you.
Lets not forget that as far as SEO goes, things like domain name are a relatively minor factor compared with more difficult factors such as link popularity. For instance, my blog is now enjoying far more search engine traffic than it did a couple of months ago because of all the people that now link to it - this has a far bigger effect than my domain name, or even my on-page SEO efforts such as the choice of title.
If you do ever plan to build the site in a way that encourages people to link to it, they are far more likely to do so if they can remember the domain! Brandability wins out yet again.
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Sean
February 15, 2008
Great artilce! Something to think about if we decide to break away from Wordpress’s site and get our own domain. Thanks again!