Domain Name importance for SEO

I have been using WebCompAnalyst to look at a few domains that I own and to understand their search engine positions and the influence a keyword rich domain name will have on the search positions.

Interestingly, one of those domains is actually my affiliate page for the webcompanalyst tool at http://www.webcompanalyst.co.uk, and of course, the keyword is webcompanalyst. So how do I compete on this competitive keyword? (Yes, it isn’t a dictionary word, but it is VERY competitive).

Well the answer is that I am in #1 spot in Google UK and in #3 for Google WebSearch behind the author’s .com address.

That isn’t really the interesting piece, the interesting piece is that I have done very little promotion on this site. Although the keywords are spattered liberally onsite, there are only a handful of domains linking to it and one therefore has to discount the power of Inbound Links. Therefore the ranking must be coming from the prominence of the keyword in the domain name.

A similar example is Selection Box which is the Affilistore site that I used for tutorial purposes when walking through creation of an Affilistore site from scratch. Now I recognise that this site has more backlinks than my webcompanalyst site, once again many are coming from within my own network and once again, I score highly for searches on selection box, #2 on both Google UK and Websearch.

I wanted to look at these sites in particular, because of a comment received here in relation my my dislike of Amazon aStore in a framed version and my promotion of Amazon proxy scripts and tools to serve HTML content. Rich (of http://www.bedguard.co.uk) stating that he was doing quite nicely in search positions on the “bed guard” keyword and that one should just optimise upon what you have and be content to frame.

Once again, using WebCompAnalyst, I took a look at the competitive results for the words “bed guard” and indeed, I can also see that BedGuard holds #7 on Google’s front page with Yahoo reporting 38,000 results … a pretty good showing.

Now Rich seems to have done done nice wrapping of the aStore and capitalised on emphasising his core keyword “Bed Guard”, but at the time of writing, he has only 2 reported links to his site … see the image below (click to expand):

Now for me, the really interesting part is that Rich is actually beating Amazon and he is only selling their products. For my opinion, although he has done a great job to include the aStore and do some onsite optimisation, the domain name has to be playing a massive part in determining the search engine position … with only 2 Inbound Links, the site should be dwarfed by other big retailers here that also have pages with significant keyword density.

But can you still buy keyword rich domains …. of course you can!! You may not be able to get hold of the one or two word domain names so easily these days, but chances are that if you look hard enough, you will still find good value domain names which fit the longer tail search terms and from the above analysis will take little effort at all to sit highly in the search engines when the keyword searched are an exact match to the the domain.

So … get your thinking caps on and buy up keyword rich domain names. And don’t overlook the aftermarket and seek out well named expired domains when they crop up.