Google and Your Domain Name

Author: Ed Biggs

Most everyone agrees that with Google content is king and natural anchor text links is second to the throne followed by the Meta Description Tag along with several other factors. But most everyone often overlooks one of those several other factors and that's the domain name.

Either people just use their company name or what they conceder a ""Cool"" name for their websites. Now, unless your company is well known or at least well known in its field, using a basically unknown name is pointless. Even more pointless is the ""Cool"" name.

The entire reason you optimize your website is to get visitors from search engines, so why not use all the tools available to get the best ranking possible for your website.

Use your domain name as one of those tools. Instead of your company name or the ""Cool"" one, use a keyword phrase, one that describes your product or service. Take your time in choosing the proper name. Make sure that it will work best for your website. If you not sure ask your friends and relatives what keywords they would use to find your product or services on the Internet. You might be surprised at what they would use.

You have the keyword phrase that you know will work. But before you jump online and get that domain name there are a couple of things you may still need to do.

Let's say you're the owner of Mike's Bikes and you specialize in Colorado Mountain Bikes so you figure to kill two birds with one stone and use the domain name mikescoloradomountainbikes.com to keep your name in it along with using the keyword phrase. Now this might make sense to you but your not Google. You're not going to like it but you need to drop the mikes out of the name because it's dead weight. So now you've got coloradomountainbikes.com but wait before you burn up the keyboard use Colorado-mountain-bikes.com instead. Why? Because Google sees this as three different words and would see coloradomountainbikes.com as a single word. When people are doing a search they will not be using coloradomountainbikes, they are going to use Colorado mountain bikes. The bonus is that your domain name now becomes a keyword phrase used by Google when it performs a search.

About the author:

Ed Biggs has been optimizing websites since 1996 and for Google since 1999. He is the founder and owner of

http://www.completewebresource.com and

http://www.google-optimizing-website.com , which specialize in Google optimizing, and sends out a monthly newsletter.