Is Having Keywords in a Domain Name a Good Idea ?

Algorithms used by search engines to crawl websites, and your advertising budget are some factors that affect a website’s ranking, and, therefore, need consideration.

This means that there is really no straight answer for whether a domain name should include keywords. There are, however, situations where keywords are manually staffed into web pages and domain names. This is called Keyword staffing. There are two main techniques that can help you in identifying a specific audience and coming up with a domain name. This is what we are going to be teaching you today.
Similar: Best site for Finding Great Domain Names

1. Know your target group

Knowing the group or audience you want to target is among the most important things for anyone getting into advertising. This is usually not a big problem for big corporations like Google, Amazon and others that have huge advertisement budgets. This is because they can easily market themselves. Another aspect that works well in their favor is the fact that they have easy to remember names.

2. What is the size of your budget?

Because of their small advertising budgets, small businesses and hobbyists alike hugely depend on online advertising campaigns which greatly relies on traffic through their websites. They do this by attracting potential customers through blog posts and newsletters. The website’s content and other marketing strategies put in place, therefore, play a big role in the success of this method. This means that the keywords in your posts and their URLs do have an effect in shaping your identity while the nature of your domain has a very insignificant effect. Below are tips to help you market a domain name with a low advertising budget.

How to select a successful domain name

The popularity of your business will greatly depend on the domain name you select. This means that the domain name will have one of the greatest impacts on how well-known you business is and, therefore, needs to be carefully considered and selected. While selecting the domain name, it is important to ensure that you will not need to change it after a while because that will mean that the work you will have done to establish yourself in the market will be in vain.

How Search Engines treat domain name keywords

It is important for you to estimate the amount of traffic you will need. This is partly because unique domain names that are likely to have high search volumes are now very rare to come across. Despite this, search engine algorithms are designed to take into account the keywords that are used within the domain name. This is so that potential customers can easily find you. Research has shown that the largest search engine market share is owned by Google while Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing still lag behind.
Additionally, it is crucial to consider the competitiveness of a keyword used because it matters a lot. Highly competitive keywords are very difficult to get a high ranking on any search engine and consequently, a domain name like football.com will mean that your website will most probably not be ranked at the top when people search for football. Still, irrespective of the keyword used on your website, it takes lots of work to get any website into the first page of any search engine results page.

Google Search Engine Updates

In 2013, Google replaced their keyword tool with the keyword planner. The keyword planner can be used for a number of functions, including finding new keywords and ideas for keyword groups. It is, therefore, correct to say that the keyword planner is an updated version of the keyword tool since it features all its functions and some additional features.
Another factor for consideration is Google’s page rank. Even though its last update was February 2013, the page rank used to be updated every three months. This has led to people thinking that this toolbar’s life has come to the end. Many people have asked questions about this, but Google have been adamant to give a response about it.
In an attempt to reduce the size of update done on a single day, Google has resorted to doing several updates on daily basis. This does not however affect the Penguin and Panda algorithms that still have big update releases. The daily updates have an added advantage in that people can see the smaller changes as they are implemented and hence adopt them.

Content quality

Despite all other methods that can be implemented to market a website, what matters most in ensuring consistently high page rankings for your website is the website’s content, organizational structure, and brand. Search engines and potential customers are usually after good content. Consequently, it is wise to spend more time ensuring your website has good content and design than trying to keep up with every algorithm update.

Check it out: How to Secure your own Domain Name?

Simplicity: Many times, people will need to type the URL of your domain directly into their web browsers in order to find you. When doing this, it is a possibility that typing mistakes like misspells may creep in. In order to avoid this, your domain name needs to be simple while also being both catchy and easy to remember. This will go a long way in ensuring that potential traffic and customers are not lost due to complex domain names.

Sensible: A domain name needs to be sensible. This means that it should clearly convey to a first-time visitor, what the website or business is about. For example, schoolbags.com directly informs a visitor that the website deals with school bags. It is, therefore, important to choose a domain name that is self-explanatory, especially considering that you will not be present to explain to a client what the name of your website means. This will also save you lots of money that would otherwise be used in branding.

.COM
This is the most common domain name extension, and also one of the oldest. Therefore, it is always a good idea to use this extension with your domain name. One of the top reasons for this is that most people assume that this is the extension that is most probably being used (not me 😀). As discussed above, this will also prevent chances of typos when the customers are typing in your website’s URL.