Sticky Web Domains

Great question. How does a domain name affect your Search Engine rankings? What actually contributes to the value of a domain name? Let?s take a look.

1. Type-in Traffic
Years ago, many people didn?t understand the difference between the URL (Uniform Resource Locater) or address of the actual website and the search window in Google. One goes directly to a particular website, like the address of a house. The other is an actual search. So people would just type in what they were looking for in the *address* field?i.e. ?new shoes?. This is called type-in traffic.

This meant that if you were lucky enough to buy a domain like ?newshoes.com? for around $7.00 per year, you would automatically receive a respectable amount of traffic to that domain?type-in traffic. This would make the domain valuable, as it could be parked or used for an ecommerce shoe store?traffic equals money.

It is 2010 now, people are more savvy. More people use the search window and they know that it is a search window. So, type-in traffic has diminished, not to mention that everyone is hip to domain ownership, any ones with any value have been bought up. Goddaddy.com even buys domains they feel will have high traffic and resells them to you and me at a premium price, this is a premium domain. By the way, they will quickly settle for 70% of the asking price if asked. Type-in traffic isn?t what it used to be and domains are more expensive.

Does it matter?
The short answer is ?not much?. Content is still king. Google works very hard to return relevant, high-quality results for it visitors. Look at Facebook.com, Google.com, yahoo.com, the domain can be anything. Can it help? Absolutely. If your domain contains your keywords you will get a little more love from Google and the search engines, but will it make or break your website? No. Shorter is better, descriptive is better. I recommend considering buying a premium domain, it is a good start.

Domain name traffic
Listen, I have owned a lot of domains, upwards of 450 at one point. I have purchased premium domains, acted as a domain broker for my clients, parked domains at different domain parking services like sedo.com, parked.com and many others. I have struggled to optimize over 150 landing pages in an effort to make a passive income?all with not much success, except learning a lot about how domains work.

Look, there are many ways to measure traffic. All of my websites are built on a CMS and it has it?s own traffic stats. Well, I also use Google Analytics on all my sites. When I compare the numbers from both, they are different. There is no way to tell who is linking to your site, conclusively. There is no way to be 100% accurate on where the traffic is coming from. I have been a victim of a scam where you ?purchase traffic?. The company explained that they had high-traffic websites?that were relevant?that you would get links from and traffic to your site. I found that that was not the case. Technically, I got traffic, but who knows where it came from. With all the traffic, I got not new customers and a very high bounce rate. The bottom line is: Don?t believe traffic reports, unless you are using Google Analytics and have personal access to the live Google Analytics account.

Old domains
One cool thing you can do is to check out archive.org . This site will let you see what a website looked like years ago. It will show you if there was a website associated with the domain you are looking at. If you want to see what your competitor?s site looked like back in ?08 you can check it out. With old domains, you want to be careful. You want to know what kind of site it was, you don?t want to do a lot of back paddling in the first few months of your new domain/website ownership. Type in ?link: yournewdomainname.com? in Google, and it will show you how many links point to that domain, same thing using Yahoo!, I use both.

Social Media

With the current trend of savvy marketers using Facebook and YouTube.com as main forefronts on their marketing campaigns, this gives domain names even less value. It actually reduces the importance of the brands entire website. Toyota recently closed a national ad by giving the address of their YouTube.com channel, not their website address. This direction both diludes and broadens the company?s marketing penetration, and for sure minimizes the impact of the domain on their website, as it would for any company.

Appraise your domain at domainappraisalking.com plus Buy and sell from domainers and submit portfolios of domain names

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Web Hosting Instructions
Web domains. Hosting. Content. These are the three top priorities for any webmaster, regardless of how experienced they are. Unfortunately, these three essentials often leave people in the dark, as there are dozens of companies offering the ?same? packages for differentdomains names prices.

Web Hosting Guide
Trying to identify a web host can be a very daunting task especially when there are so many available nowadays and all of them promise one thing or another because looking for and buying a reliable web hosting solution is an imperative decision.

Finding The Best Web Hosting Service
Finding the best hosting service for your website can be complicated. The best wayweb hosting to select a quality web host is to take the selection process one step at a time.

Dedicated Servers
If you are currently engaged in any facet of ecommerce, even service sectors, a website makes up a great deal of your business. Therefore, it is a safe assumption that you pay for hosting your website in some fashion.

Hosting Overseas
All top hosting contenders do meet standard requirements for standard hosting services, and overseas companies often will meet these needs for a lower price than US or Europe based competitors, but should hosting be outsourced overseas?

How to Choose the Best Web Hosting Service
Choosing the right kind of web hosting service can be a very daunting task at times as there are some very important features that you need to make sure of. Here you can find what exactly to look for when choosing the best web hosting service.

A Soundry of Options for Web Hosting
Web hosting, one of the most important functions in the website process, allows website owners to put up their creative masterpieces. Although people assume that there is only one type of package, this article clearly shows how wrong the myth can be.

How to Make Money with Web Hosting
Dying to make extra cash? Surprisingly, web hosting can actually help with your bills. In a few simple steps, you will be on your way to a richer lifestyle.

Which Web Hosting is Right for You
Websites are one of the most popular forms of entertainment. While making a website is essential, the majority of beginners do not realize that web hosting is even more important.

Why Reliable Web Hosting
In today’s competitive world reliable web hosting is very critical especially for the success of online businesses. You need to seek a web hosting company that can provide you with these critical components and much more.

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This is a pretty hotly debated question at the moment, so I thought I would share what I have found in my research, as well as by trial and error…

According to Matt Cutts, Google spokesman, Google’s algorithm doesn’t penalize for use of hyphenated domains even if there are more than 2 or even 3 in separated by hyphens. So keyword-rich-domains.com will fair no better with Google than keywordrichdomains.com will.

Of course this is not necessarily true of other search engines. For most of us, our main concern is what Google’s software will or won’t do, but there are a lot of other search engines out there too.

The one area Matt Cutts separated out was situations where there could be confusion as to where the breaks between keywords should be. An example shown was that of books-exchange.com vs. booksexchange.com for obvious reasons. Matt claims that Google can tell which division is appropriate for your site, one would assume due to content.

But what if you are using that particular domain primarily as a redirect? I am not completely sure they would pick it up in that case, so keep that in mind when buying domains to use exclusively as redirects…

Interestingly, Matt says that it is best to separate your keywords in a path by hyphens as many search engines will pick them up much better this way. He specified that hyphens were far better than underscores. What we are referring to here is the section of a particular url that occurs after the extension (.com, .net, .info…).

So according to this yourdomain.com/whatever-you-want.html is better than yourdomain.com/whateveryouwant.html for many search engines.

To take advantage of this in a WordPress blog situation you need to change the Permalink structure under Settings to Custom and type in this: /%category%/%postname%.html

This changes the pathways structure for your blog and allows you to hyphenate the keywords you choose to include in the pathway portion of the url for each post.

None of this is to say there aren’t downsides to hyphenating the root domain such as best-domains.info Most of these have to do with verbally communicating your website address and the confusion that can result. Some people also think that a non-hyphenated domain name just looks better.

These concernsare not entirely frivolous, but let’s face it folks we are also dealing with a commodity that is not unlimited! There are definite advantages to keyword rich domains just as there are advantages to a .com over a .net or a .info as this site uses.

So you weigh your desired keywords over availability of extension. You take into account whether your keywords should be hyphenated, or even if the non-hyphenated domain is available. Keeping in mind your intended use for the domain (redirects) you then make the best decision available to you…

Competition over keyword rich domain names is at a fever pitch these days, so these issues are not going away anytime soon, or probaby ever!

I advise you to use the extensions necessary to get the keywords you want but be alert to opportunities that present themselves in the marketplace. Use hyphens to get your desired keywords when you need to, or to segment ambiguous domain names when necessary.

Apply balance using hyphens in domain names and you will be fine…

Jim Patterson
Premium Domains with High PR Backlink Packages
Tips And Pointers on Domains and Related SEO Tips

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