Domain Names and Anchor Text
By Aaron Wall
Branding vs Naming
Many people say that the name of a website should be original. It should convey some sense of branding unlike any other site. They say your name should not be generic.
The truth of this matter is that branding is more developed by how you interact with people than by what your name is. Your name can be used to help develop brand, but many smart webmasters use their domain name for more than just branding.
Superstar Websites
People take the branding idea one step further and rattle off some of the best technological leaders. Amazon, Google, Yahoo!, Ebay, etc. None of these sites say what they do in their site name.
Google is so powerful because it is the only Google. It was a wide open market. Yahoo! became Yahoo! because there was no great well marketed directory on the web. Ebay became Ebay because nobody else had a PEZ trading marketplace. (Ebay is yet one more great thing we all owe to PEZ).
Business Facts
Most successful businesses or websites will not be like Google. Most will not be a runaway technological success. Most businesses become successful from soft innovations. Small focused consumer centric changes can help you craft a successful business model.
For every Yahoo! or Google on the market there are 1,000 Door Hangers.com or Cheese.com websites which are doing just fine "bringing in the cheese."
Anchor Text
Anchor text is extremely important to search engines. What a link says is as important as who is saying it. When I link to your site with the words "I eat cats" as the link text a search engine will evaluate that link and assume you eat cats.
You can't control all the links you get (meow), but you can help control some of them. People often link to you using the words in your domain name as the link text (also known as anchor text.) If your domain name has your primary keywords in it then you have an extremely powerful business advantage over your competitors.
Using Dashes in Domain Names
Most of the benefit of dashes in the domain name have eroded in the last year or two. Domain names themselves have been greatly devalued in search engine algorithms, and most links use the site name vice the domain name as the anchor text.
I am of the opinion that you usually can pick out a keyword rich domain name without needing dashes. It may take a bit of creativity and a bit of time, but it is possible. If you are aiming to sell products vice become a consultant you may be able to do well making a living from search engine traffic and not need as strong of a branded name behind your domain.
Brandable Generic Domain Names
Sometimes they do still exist!
I wanted to write an ebook about SEO. Less than a year ago the domain name SEObook.com was still available. It will not always be that easy to find a domain name, but if you think hard enough you should be able to find a brandable domain name which is also keyword rich.
High quality directories usually prefer to list sites by their name vice "insert keyword phrase here."
Having a domain name like mine makes it very easy for me to get inbound links with "SEO Book" or "Search Engine Optimization Book" as the link text. This allows me to rank better for those search phrases, and eventually it will allow me to rank good for "SEO" and "search engine optimization."
Creativity in Domain Naming
If the domain name with your keywords is already taken you still have many other options. If my domain name was taken odds are I could have still got a domain name like seo-ebook-book.biz, but that seems a bit too generic and lacks the creativity to keep it somewhat brandable while still making it keyword rich.
Usually you can add other words around the main words in your domain name to keep the keyword rich words in there without making it overly long. TheSEObook.com is one example of an alternate domain I could have used. I could also try synonyms. I just looked and SEOreport.com was gone. My next guess for a name was SEOsecrets.com, and it was still available. There are a ton of good domain names still on the market.
Domain Name Summary
Search engines such as Google heavily weight link text in their relevancy algorithms. Soft innovations drive most successful businesses. It is highly unlikely that my business or your business is going to be the next Google. Often times keyword rich domain names are available which will give you a considerable competitive advantage over your competition.
About the Author
Aaron Wall, author of The SEOBook The Most Comprehensive and Updated Search Engine Optimization ebook on the planet, You know your product better than SEOs do. Because you know your product better and know your industry better you can do a better job of promoting your sites than they would.
Other Search Engine Optimization Articles By Aaron Wall
1) The Tools for optimizing your site for the search engines : Don't even think of doing your own search engine positioning unless you have these software programs with you.
2) Choosing the correct keywords for your site : Tells you how you can choose the keywords for which you should optimize your site for the search engines.
3) The importance of having your own domain name : Tells you why you need to have your own domain name in order to get a high ranking in the search engines.
4) Creating Keyword Rich Pages : Tells you how you can create pages which are designed to rank highly in all the search engines.
5) Creating a robots.txt file : How you can create a robots.txt file in order to prevent your site from being penalized for spamming by the search engines.
6) Software to help you create a robots.txt file : Describes a software which will automate the task of creating a robots.txt file.
7) Improving the Link Popularity of your site : Link popularity is becoming an increasingly important factor in search engine placement. Find out the methods you can use to improve the link popularity of your site, and know which methods you should not use.
8) Submitting your site to the Open Directory : Discover how you should submit your site to the Open Directory in order to get a high ranking in many of the major search engines.
9) Becoming an Open Directory Project Editor : Can't get your site listed in the Open Directory, no matter how hard you try? Find out how you can become an editor of the Open Directory and get your site an optimum listing in it. Here's what one of the subscribers of our newsletter had to say about this article:
10) Frames and Search Engines : Find out how to get good rankings in the search engines if your site uses frames.
11) Page Cloaking - To Cloak or Not to Cloak : Find out what is page cloaking, how it is implemented, and whether or not you should actually use page cloaking.
12) Top 10 Search Engine Positioning Mistakes : The top mistakes that people make when they try to optimize their sites for the search engines. Avoid these mistakes to save yourself a lot of anguish and frustration in the long-run.
13) Glossary : Contains an explanation of commonly used terms in the world of search engine positioning
14) Improving Your Website Rankings : Only one site out of 100 gets substantial targeted traffic . . . and these successful sites are the ones that understand the importance of proper search engine optimization and search engine placement.
15) 5 Steps To Increase Your Google Page Rank : Google Page rank is based on back links. Back links are Links pointing to your website from another website. The more back links you have the higher your PR will be.
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