SEO: The Case For Using Keywords In Domains Names and Web Pages
By Anna Johnson on February 6th, 2011Having a keyword rich domain name is NOT be the be-all and end-all. After all, Google, Bing and Yahoo! don’t have ‘search engine’ in their domain names. At the same time, we’ve found that, all else being equal, a domain name containing the keywords you’re targeting for the search engines beats a more generic domain name for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.
Now, let me stress that ‘all else being equal’ may NOT apply. For instance, Kikabink News currently ranks pretty highly for ‘Internet marketing blog’ in Google, and there’s no ‘Internet marketing blog’ in our domain name.
There are reasons for that, and there are reasons for why YOU won’t always want to use a keyword-rich domain name. We’ll leave that discussion for another day, but for now, let’s talk about why you WOULD want to use a keyword-rich domain name and, furthermore, a keyword-rich website architecture.
So what do we mean by ‘keyword-rich domain name’ and ‘keyword-rich web architecture’?
Simply put, a keyword-rich domain name is a domain name containing the keywords you want your website to rank highly for in the search engines. A keyword-rich web architecture is one where you use those keywords in the names of the folders and files (including web pages) on your website.
For example, if you’re targeting the keywords ‘search engine optimization’ for one of your web pages, you might name the file (web page) ‘search-engine-optimization.htm’. And if you’ve organized your website into categories or folders, you might use keywords for the names of those categories or folders as well.
You might, for instance, use the following folder/category and file/web page structure: ‘www.website.com/seo/search-engine-optimization.htm
The aim of naming your folders/categories and files/web pages based on keywords is just to tell the search engines that your website is about those keywords.
No-one knows, for sure, how much weight the search engines give to using these naming conventions (except the search engines themselves) but their importance is likely to approach that of including keywords in your title tags, headings and page text.
Sure, getting back-links from authoritative websites is still the most important factor in boosting your search engine rankings, but after that comes deploying keywords on your webpages and, ideally, in the names of your domain, folders and web pages.
February 7th, 2011 at 1:30 pm
Very useful information in this post. Thank you for this information. I will definitely be sending this over to my team to read.
February 10th, 2011 at 4:25 am
Personally, I think exact match domains start to look REALLY cheesy when you get into 3 and 4 word phrases. If you can rank above an EMD while having your brand name as the domain name, it’ll look much more attractive.