After a long time of inactivity on this Blog, I just got started again.
Coming back to you while setting up a new Joomla 1.5 website to write some stuff about finding your best domain name.
First of all, did you do your homework on finding the right keywords?
You will need them in this process, or not :-)
You see, there a two ways to go about this domain name searching, one is to incorporate your main keyword in the domain name, like -SEO for instance.
The other one is to look for a domain name that is short and sweet and easily to remember.
Using Keywords in You domain name
Best option of course would be to have both… like joomlaseo.net which is short, easy to remember and contains the two main keywords Joomla and SEO.
Problem with this now would be that Joomla! is more protected than before and the use of Joomla in a domain name should be approved by the Joomla.org website.
This is just an example of how you need to think about using a brand name in your domain URL.
Amazon for instance and Google will contact your and start asking you to give that domain name to theme since they are the holders of this registered trademark.
So be careful if you want to do that, or get permissions first!
Better is to look for a domain name that is simple and gets the right idea and stickiness to it, like alledia.com which is short, sounds good an is through its website content now seen as one of the best sources for Joomla SEO.
As you can see, there is no Joomla and no SEO in the domain name itself, it is the content that works to boost its visitors and rankings in the SERPs.
Google doesn’t care much about domain names Yahoo and Live.com however still give you some points for having keywords in your domain.
I have a website about Network Documentation (I am an ICT Manager in my Daily work…) and it is ranking nr one in Live.com and nr three in Yahoo, just because of the domain name….
I checked Google as well, but could not find it n the first 10 ! pages… so I need to do a lot of work there (its a Drupal site and I am still learning SEO for Drupal as I go along)
Did you also see the main competition? and yes, networkdocumentation.com was already taken so they have a head start on me.
For my own domain name, I had to do a re-inclusion request at Google, since it was a spam site before I got it.
So here is a tip: if you have found a nice domain name and it is free! (check that first with your hosting provider) go to www.archive.org and use the “Waybackmachine” tool to see if it was used before and how it looked like. That is how I found out why I couldn’t get it into Google at all in the first place.
Short and sweet Domain names
You could also do some brainstorming sessions to get spunky names or if you are trying to build a brand on the Internet use that brand name.
Like Alledia or Hummerbie as a simple example.
Just make sure the names are short and use a good keyword rich title for your website, since you now want people to use link to you with the keyword you target.
Mostly they will use the title of you site to create a link. So for this Blog you could link to Joomla SEO Blog but you also could use that same link title to link to Joomla SEO Blog ;-)
Use your imagination and you will see how creative you really can be once you start throwing your ideas on a white-board or a piece of paper (electric ones work oké too).
if you want to go into the deep end and want tons of websites or if your customers asks you to help them, you could buy this book Killer Domains from Daily Blog Tips.
Domain Extensions
A short paragraph on domain extensions or tld’s , you know, the endings of a domain name?
There are a lot of them and it looks like there are going to be even more if all plans as expected.
The best ones for an international market are .com .net .org which are simply the bests tld’s.
But they could be taken and you need to venture out to other tld’s or choose an other name.
.info is not that good since some people think if you use that it is a spam site (I wonder why..)
You could also look at some foreign ones like .tv (expensive) or .it but those are just gadget like domains.
.mobi does work very well if you target mobile users.
What works best in extensions is to choose a tld that is locale to the market you want to target.
I use a .nl tld for my dutch web websites and that works great.
In conclusion: look at your competitors and what they use, look at your keywords list and be creative in finding that domain name that works for you!
P.s. If you have some great ideas on how to ease this process, don’t hesitate to throw them into the comments.
Tags: Blog, building, domain, Joomla, name, site
Related Posts
i am sure there are seo effect on your ranking due to keywords in domain name, but we cannot say with keyword in domain name guarantee us high ranking and vice versa, i came across so many website they are ranking high with very competitive keywords(such as, luxury holidays, holidays to mauritius, northeast advertising etc)with out related domain names
These days it can be tough to get short and sweet domain names. I think it would be wise to focus more on keywords in your URL first and foremost.
@Blog K: You would be suprised how it is possible to get short and sweet domein names with a little creativity and thinking outside the box.
Think outside the box if you want a creative Domain name, Thanks for the tips though really usefull
Thanks for a great blog post. It is very important to decide whether you want to build a big brand like: Alledia or you want to get instant traffic for a small website. Brands stand by themselves and will have more staying power among the masses. What are the most popular sites: Amazon, Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter? What are not so popular: women.com, cars.com, photos.com, etc?
You can have a small site like: Vacation Golf Home and still get high rankings for “vacation golf homes�
If you are able to realistically able to repeat your name in the URL, Title Tag, H1 Header tag, and in somewhere in your firsts paragraph without making it look stuffy, you have a good shot at good rankings through SEO. Some names surprisingly do no lend themselves to that. More descriptive words like in your example “Network Documentation� fit in nicely in all of those sections I had mentioned. Some brands would seem very awkward and would appear to be keyword stuffing for SEO purposes
Hummerbie, thank you for exploring this subject. It is very important to understand these nuances when it comes to SEO and site optimization.
Good suggestion on using the Wayback machine. Sometimes those harmless-looking, perfectly-named domains may have a checkered past. Before picking up a domain name that may be banned or blocked due to previously delivering malware, trojans, or porn, you need to do a background check.
But you need to go beyond the Internet Archive. There is a free Domain Background Check cheat sheet at http://siteriver.com/domaintest.php – just enter the domain name you are researching and over a dozen links are created to domain check, anti-malware, and other tools. You can quickly check if your domain name is ready for business or is still on parole.
this is hard because most of the simplest names are all gone, and i’m not going to pay thousands of dollars for a site i can pay just a few dollars for. you just have to be creative these days.
Keywords domains can be very effective for SEO search. But they can also bet forgettable and awful with branding. Remember pets.com? Actually, better example is to name three travel sites. Is any one of them hotels.com?
I went for both. My site is new but I don’t get too many hits for “…how to make my site better…”
@Michigan City Pest Control: You just have to be creative. If a stand name like SanDiegoDentist.com is taklen then you can think of creative names like MySandDiegoDentist.com, etc.
One of my site not successfull using keyword targetted and almost same with very popular PR6 site. my site is http://www.reviewforjoomla.com, now i try to focus on my personal site http://www.andiwijaya.com. You right man google dont give much point on domain names, but PR yes.
I think having any easy to remember and pronounce domain name would be important as well. It takes less time and money to brand a domain people will remember. But if one has quality content, I can see the benefit of a keyword rich domain.
It’s hard to find or get a good .com these days. I don’t exactly like hyphen sites, sites with numbers, .net, .org, or dot anything else. Something with a .com is preferred, but terribly hard to find a decent and easy to remember name, which also might fit someones niche.
Domain name is probably the best way to make a site seo friendly but I would not count on yahoo and bing for traffic or examples cause they act way different than google and that search engine is the only one that matters. If you have good visibility in G then you will get that same visibility in others too. Subdomains are coming more hard to rank for so use exact domain name.
This post was definitely worth reading. I have a lot to consider!
The domain name is definitely one of the most critical components of developing any online presence, both in terms of SEO, but also for user-perception of what the site/blog is all about.
There are some .info sites that rank well and a lot of visitors go there. It is not true that it is for spam sites. However, a lot of spammers use that domain because first year is usually cheap.
-Kai
@Kai & Los Angeles: Yes, .Info domains are getting better and better these days and are slowly becomming a good choice if a . com domain is allready gone.
My preffered choice is still .com first, local domain namens like.nl second, then .net and .org or .info after that.
It all depends on the kind of visitors you want to target and what kind of site you want to build.