Search Marketing Courses

Choosing a domain name is an important part of creating an online business. In general, businesses have two options – a keyword rich domain name or a branding-focused domain name. In this video Aaron Wall of SEO Book fame demonstrates the benefits of a keyword rich domain name.

Aaron provides a couple of good examples of the ranking benefits of a good name as well as other advantages (such as helping your click-through-rate and pushing your competition below the fold in the search results). He even suggests that a keyword rich domain name can help one’s pay-per-click campaign (although I’m not sure how it can help lower one’s cost-per-click).

For anyone grappling with the issue of whether to pursue a keyword rich domain name or a branding-focused one, this is an important video to watch:

Domain Names & Search Engine Optimization (02:58)

After watching this video, I had the following questions (some of which I posted on the comments section on YouTube – although I’m currently waiting for Aaron to approve the comment). Here are the questions:

1) How does ranking #1 in Google lower one’s Pay-per-click cost?

2) It’s hard today to find quality, keyword rich domain names. What advice does Aaron (or anyone else) offer? Should one attempt to buy an existing domain name? Often times this can be prohibitably expensive for most people and businesses. What then?

3) Are there any advantages of 2 word domain names over 3 word domain names (or vice versa)?

4) How would a website like www.searchmarketingcourses.com compete against www.searchmarketing.com for the search phrase ‘search marketing’ (in terms of the ranking benefit of a keyword rich domain name)? Are they both at equal playing level since they both contain the phrase, or does www.searchmarketing.com have an advantage since it contains only the phrase and nothing else?

Finally, I want to emphasize out that branding-focused domain names have their own advantage – as I will point out in a future post.