Domain Name’s Role in Website Success
Recently, I’ve been absolutely stunned at the importance of choosing the right domain name for a website. It’s not that you can’t overcome the choice of a poor domain name (such as Keys to Website Success) but choosing the right domain name certainly gives your fledgling website a giant step ahead of the rest of the game.
Choosing a domain name with the “right” keywords can literally be the difference between website success and website failure.
I installed a Wordpress self hosted blog for a client about 6 months ago. Like many of my clients, she had trouble getting “motivated” to post regularly to her blog. After 4 months, she had only posted 10 articles, many of those were poems. To say she wasn’t using frequently searched keywords in her posts would be an understatement.
When she asked me to look at her log files, I have to confess, I was expecting the worst. Her posts were erratic both in frequency and content. However, I was PLEASANTLY surprised when I ran a log file analysis. Despite her erratic posting, she was still getting several hundred visitors a day to her self hosted Wordpress blog. Digging deeper into the log files gave me the answer to the secret to her website success: she had registered the “right” keyword domain name.
By registering a domain name which contained the keyword string used by people to find her services, this client was enjoying an incredible level of website success! Website visitors were signing up for her newsletter and returning time and time again to read her blog.
So if there were one word of advice I would give someone looking to start their new website, it would be this: register the right domain name.
Finding the Right Keyword Domain Name
It’s really quite simple to find the right keyword domain name.
Begin by visiting the Google Adword Selector. Test your potential domain names here. Test various combinations. For example, the keywords “success factors” are searched, on average five times more than “success strategies”. So if you’re trying to decide between two domain names, one that includes the words “success factors” and one that includes “success strategies”, you’d be better off registering the first name over the second.
The internet is more than a decade old and great domain names that are available are hard to find. That’s why you need the following tools:
The Word Wizard allows you to combine your keywords with your location. Simply enter the word you want to optimize for, choose “before or after” and then pick if you want to combine that word with a US state or a major city. VIOLA! Localized search engine optimization magic!
On the other hand, maybe you don’t want to confine your self to a particular US location, then there’s another tool called the Domain Twist This domain name registration tool allows you to combine two different keywords into dozens of domain name possibilities. Sometimes, the addition of an e before a keyword combo is all you need to snatch up a great keyword specific domain name!
I had another client who set out to deliberately built a self hosted Wordpress blog using this strategy. Within 4 weeks, she found her blog at #4 in Google on her keyword. To say she’s ecstatic would be an understatement.
Search engines drive incredible amounts of traffic. Picking the right keyword domain name can help you to achieve website success - even if you’re doing everything else wrong (like the client first mentioned in this article)! However, when you do everything right (like the latter client) it can turn into real marketing magic for your website.
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