Can someone explain? Targeting keywords in domains...

16 years ago

Alright, your real competition would be 16,700 results.

And well, you're right about keywords in domains, it's a LOT easier to rank with keyworded domains... that's not all there is to it though. It depends more on who you're competing against.

It's not as much how many sites you're competing against as WHO you're competing with. If it's all Amazon and Wikipedia like sites then you probably won't rank that well just by having a keyworded domain.

However, I've had instances where I've ranked on front page JUST by having the domain name. I bought the domain and installed wordpress and I literally did NOTHING after that because I didn't have time to work with it right then... about 2 weeks later, still nothing done with the domain, I find myself at #5.

Anyway, just make sure you've got some good internal SEO structure (wordpress is awesome), unique content and get yourself some good backlinks (try building a linkwheel or five, it's in my sig) and you should do okay.

Hope that helps man, cheers,
Linus

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4runner 16 years ago

Hey Jonathan

Greetings to another fellow BC'er.

Anyway, as lemonarian mentioned, your "true" competition is technically 17,000 pages since they have optimized whatever page that is ranking in Google with that exact match keyphrase.

However, nobody ever types in keywords surrounded by quotes, so what ends up really mattering at the end of the day is, can you rank amongst those 3,000,000? and really, only the top 10 to 20 results actually MATTER. The quality/authority of the top 10 to 20 sites are the true measure of competition so you can use a tool to check backlinks and authority of what those sites are doing (I use market samurai for this but there's many others).

In terms of domain names being the keyword that you want to rank for, although it's supposed to *help*, my experience has been as long as you use something like wordpress, and the keyword is in the URL, you can rank.

I rank for a competitive product that has 10,200,000 competing pages (above the product creator's page) and I've got the #1 & #2 position with an indented listing - and the keyword phrase is just the name of the page on my domain.

Also as lemonarian mentioned, quality backlinks play a big factor along with the typical onpage SEO properties of wordpress. If you want some tips, PM me and I'll let you know what I use for themes as well as the extra plugins and other tools I use.

cheers
t.
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Joe Stewart

16 years ago

Hi Jonathan,

Yes, your true competition would be the results in quotes and your domain name with the exact keywords "should" get preference, but it's going to depend on a few other factors. Here are just a few off the top of my head.

#1. Check the top 10-20 sites ranked for that keyword phrase. Go to Yahoo search and enter their domain as follows links:domainname.com. Check how many links that page has coming back to it. Notice I said "page" not website. Pages are ranked, not entire sites. However, if you find a page that's NOT a home page then you have a better chance of outranking it.

#2. Check for high ranked domains. If you're trying to compete with an established directory site, .gov, .edu, etc, then you're going to have a hard time bumping them off, at least in the beginning. If there are several of those in the top 10 then you may be better off moving on to the next one. Think "low hanging fruit".

#3. The age of the domain. If you buy a domain from an aftermarket site where it's got some longevity to it, like 1-2 years or more, you'll likely have a better chance of ranking well than if you just buy it new. Also, if you are fortunate enough to find a keyword phrase with decent traffic and are fortunate enough to get the .com domain name, then I highly recommend you register it for at least 5 years if you plan to build on it.

#4. You can also check the following. Simply enter your keyword phrase in quotes after:

allintitle:"keyword phrase"

This will give you a count of how many of your competitors have that phrase in their title tag.

allinurl:"keyword phrase"

This will measure how many of your competitors have those words in their URL.

allinanchor:"keyword phrase"

This will give a count of how many times there is a link pointing to that page using anchor text.

It seems like I'm missing something, but I can't remember. Hmmm...

Of course, there are several other factors to look for and other things you can do to help yourself, but those are a good rule of thumb to keep in mind.

Anyway, I hope that helps. It's not perfect by any means so everyone please chime in if you have something to add. Or if you see what I forgot. :-)

Hope that helps.

Joe

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JonathanBoettcher

16 years ago

Thanks guys - that's helpful.

@lemonarian - great little report on linkwheels - I think I'm going to give that to my VA and put that in action.

@4-runner - yeah, I use wordpress for everything. It's amazing.

@GuitarJoe - thanks - many helpful tips there. What's a good number of results to aim for with these targeted searches (allintitle: etc)? most of my keywords come up with around 1000 competitors when narrowed down this way... and not very many of the "majors" though YouTube is fairly prevalent.

Thanks
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LindseyInteractive 16 years ago

Well you have to realize that just because you have a keyword rich domain, that is not all you need to get it ranked.

It will help when it comes to some SEO purposes, but with Google constantly changing their algorithms alot, it is more than just rich domains that help.

You need to get back links in order to help your page rank and your rankings. The more back links the better, and not just only any back links try to get back links from quality sources.

By this I mean, a link back from gibsonguitar.com will boost your ranking alot more than if the link came from a toy store website.

I hope this helps, if you have any other questions please feel free to ask.
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Joe Stewart

16 years ago

Originally Posted by JonathanBoettcher

@GuitarJoe - thanks - many helpful tips there. What's a good number of results to aim for with these targeted searches (allintitle: etc)? most of my keywords come up with around 1000 competitors when narrowed down this way... and not very many of the "majors" though YouTube is fairly prevalent.

No problem. Actually, it's hard to to say "okay, 5,000-10,000 or less is good" without knowing some of the other factors first.

In the case of "allintitle", these are competitors that likely have a clue about what they're doing because they've placed those keywords in their title tags. Therefore, it's going to come down to other factors, such as on page optimization, incoming links that are anchor text and from sites with related topics, etc.

As I said before, you can get a good idea of what you'll need to do by simply checking what your competition has done. Look at their source code and see if they're using HI, H2, H3 tags on the page. If they're not using those then it shouldn't be too hard to overtake them, however, once again it's hard to say without actually seeing the competition because every situation is different.

Do you own Keyword Elite? That has an excellent function for measuring competition that works well.

I hope that helps.

Joe

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JonathanBoettcher 16 years ago

Originally Posted by Guitarjoe

Do you own Keyword Elite? That has an excellent function for measuring competition that works well.

Actually I do... I just formatted my PC so I guess I should dig that up and check it out again. Been a while since I've used it.
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Bob Monie

16 years ago

Nobody searches in quotes outside of IM. Your real competition is the 3,000,000 results.
Iv had keyword rich domains rank number 1 with quoted search and then out of the top 10 without quotes.

The days, Google put a lot of trust in well established authority sites. Some of these sites dont even need to contain the quoted key phrase "rock guitar lesson" to rank higher than you. They only need to contain "rock" "guitar" "lesson" randomly on their site. Thats the power of authority.

"rock guitar lesson"
rock guitar lesson

These two are great examples of what im talking about. From my location in Australia, Google only displays 1 website in both the quoted and un-quoted versions of that key phrase. This proves that the authority sites containing those words randomly on their site ranks better than a poorer quality site with the quoted key phrase. 3,000,000 is definitely your real comp.

Im a huge fan of keyword rich domain names, especially domains that match your target key phrase 100%. It just makes ranking so much easier and faster.

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Kurt

16 years ago

Originally Posted by Bob Monie

Nobody searches in quotes outside of IM. Your real competition is the 3,000,000 results.
Iv had keyword rich domains rank number 1 with quoted search and then out of the top 10 without quotes.

The days, Google put a lot of trust in well established authority sites. Some of these sites dont even need to contain the quoted key phrase "rock guitar lesson" to rank higher than you. They only need to contain "rock" "guitar" "lesson" randomly on their site. Thats the power of authority.

"rock guitar lesson"
rock guitar lesson

These two are great examples of what im talking about. From my location in Australia, Google only displays 1 website in both the quoted and un-quoted versions of that key phrase. This proves that the authority sites containing those words randomly on their site ranks better than a poorer quality site with the quoted key phrase. 3,000,000 is definitely your real comp.

Im a huge fan of keyword rich domain names, especially domains that match your target key phrase 100%. It just makes ranking so much easier and faster.

The 3 million sites should be considered the macro competition, whereas finding the micro competition would be better. The 3 million total contains pages that may only be "semi-optimized" for any of the three words in the stringm which is what a query without quotes will return.

Bob does bring up a valid point about the results being different for each, which really means there's two different possible searches to get traffic, one places more focus on "on page" (quotes) while the other uses more off page stuff (non quotes).

I think what most people miss though, is that the competition numbers are more of an "index" than an actual number and neither tell you exactly how much competition there is. Instead, these numbers are relative and should be compared to other keyword numbers. That's the value.

Also, if you are really looking for long tail keywords, which "rock guitar lesson" probably is borderline, authority will mean less.

In my opinion, the best option, one that's both accurate, is to use a variation of the one Guitar Joe posted, but is easier:

Use the 3 "in" hacks at the same time:
intitle:"rock guitar lesson" inanchor:"rock guitar lesson" intext:"rock guitar lesson"

(Note: I don't think you can use the "allin" hacks at the same time, which is why this is easier)

I get 42 results for this search:
intitle:"rock guitar lesson" inanchor:"rock guitar lesson" intext:"rock guitar lesson" - Google Search

Now, the "42" results is NOT the true number of competitng sites, as Rob pointed out. It is the number of sites that have basic "on page" SEO.

However, I believe this "42" is the best number, based on accuracy and ease. And this is the number one should use to compare to other keyword phrases.

For example, the "3 ins" search for "guitar lessons" returns 327,000 results.

3 ins for "beginner guitar lesson" returns 96 results.

Here's the numbers we should compare:
42
96
327,000

Now, having said all of this...I only use this when I am limited to a single page, like a squidoo lens, which isn't often, or for doman names. Even then, competition is only one factor of the three that should be considered:

Competition (supply)
Number of Searches (demand)
Value (not all traffic is equal in monetary value)

The truth is, if you already picked a niche, you want to target as many keyword phrases as you can, focusing on the ones with the "best" numbers, be it low supply, high demand and/or high value. The only way to get serious traffic is to rank well for dozens, if not hundreds, of decent keyword phrases.

IMO, keyword research shouldn't be done to find a good keyword, but instead to find the BEST keywords in a particular niche.

The term "best" is also relative...The less experienced you are, the more you should focus on competition (supply). Whereas highly skilled SEOers will consider high-paying, high-traffic numbers as "best".

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JonathanBoettcher

16 years ago

Originally Posted by Kurt

Use the 3 "in" hacks at the same time:
intitle:"rock guitar lesson" inanchor:"rock guitar lesson" intext:"rock guitar lesson"

(Note: I don't think you can use the "allin" hacks at the same time, which is why this is easier)

I get 42 results for this search:
intitle:"rock guitar lesson" inanchor:"rock guitar lesson" intext:"rock guitar lesson" - Google Search

Now, the "42" results is NOT the true number of competitng sites, as Rob pointed out. It is the number of sites that have basic "on page" SEO.

However, I believe this "42" is the best number, based on accuracy and ease. And this is the number one should use to compare to other keyword phrases.

For example, the "3 ins" search for "guitar lessons" returns 327,000 results.

3 ins for "beginner guitar lesson" returns 96 results.

Here's the numbers we should compare:
42
96
327,000

Now, having said all of this...I only use this when I am limited to a single page, like a squidoo lens, which isn't often, or for doman names. Even then, competition is only one factor of the three that should be considered:

Competition (supply)
Number of Searches (demand)
Value (not all traffic is equal in monetary value)

Thanks Kurt - I wasn't aware that you can use all of those hacks together at the same time. That really does give a better picture of who's actually optimizing for the term.

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Alan Mc Donald 16 years ago

fantastic thread guys with some great info: i do have a question though. when analysing your competition how important is their domain age ?

i have found a killer keyword phrase with great amount of exact match searches and all of the page 1 results have no PR according to market samurai...... but the top 10 results have domains with an average age of 8 years

would a brand new blog rank easily with sufficient backlinks even though the competition has old domains?

hope this makes sense

thank you

alan
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- 4runner 16 years ago
  
  Originally Posted by Pattaya-Addict
  
  fantastic thread guys with some great info: i do have a question though. when analysing your competition how important is their domain age ? ...
  
  alan
  
  Domain age DOES play a role in Google's ranking algorithm. Here's a handy checklist you can refer to:
  
  1. Keyword Use In Title Tags
  The title tag is probably the single most important HTML tag, not only because Google considers it to be a very important ranking factor, but also because Google uses the title tag text to create the listing's heading (the blue link) on the search results. It is therefore equivalent to the headline of an ad inciting searchers to visit the site.
  
  2. Global Link Popularity of Site
  Last year this would have been considered the single most important factor. However, recent changes in the Google algorithm have slightly reduced the importance of the overall number of inbound links pointing to the site. The factor is still extremely important and weight, authority and relevance of the links are also factored into considerations.
  
  3. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
  The text contained within the link (between the <a> and </a> tags in the HTML) is called the anchor text. This text serves as a description of the link's target, and is hence a very clear indication to users and the search engine of what the target page will be about. As a result, this continues to be a very important factor in ranking a site.
  
  4. Link Popularity within Site's Internal Link Structure
  Unlike external links from third-party websites, internal links are fully within the control of the webmaster. How these internal links are structured gives Google a very clear indication of which pages are more important for the site owners. Accordingly, Google perceives this as an internal vote for the importance of individual pages.
  
  5. Age of Site
  Authority of a site, according to the Google algorithm is determined by two main factors: The number and quality of links pointing to it and the age of the site, in terms of the period of time that the site has contained indexable content seen by the search engines. Webmasters have no control over this factor. The only way to affect this is by buying old websites.
  
  6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links To Site
  Relevance has always been the mantra of Google ranking, and this factor is a mere extension of that fact. Not only is it important to have lots of links pointing to a site, but it is also important that a good number of these links are from sites related to the topic of the target page and the target keyword.
  
  7. Link Popularity of Site In Topical Community
  Increased use of social networking sites and user generated content has turned the Internet and SEO around in the past year. Accordingly, a new factor now considered of importance is the link weight and authority of the target website amongst its topical peers in the online world.
  
  8. Keyword Use in Body Text
  Link bombs and spam linking enabled websites to be ranked, in the past, for keywords that were not even present on the site. This has changed. Google will almost never rank a site now based solely on links pointing to it, no matter how many they may be. Use of the targeted search term in the visible, HTML text of the page is a must.
  
  9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
  This is all about PageRank of the site that is providing a link. Number and quality of links matter. The quality of the link is determined by its relevance and by its own link popularity. Hence, a single link from an extremely popular (high PR) website will be worth much much more than many more links from a relatively unknown site.
  
  10. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site
  Sudden spikes in the number of inbound links pointing to a site are unnatural. Google constantly monitors the frequency and timing of external sites linking to given domain, even though this may not be reflected in the link counts they show on their search results. A steady upward growth rate is always best.
  
  The full article with all other ranking factors can be read at:
  
  * I can't post full URLS, but this is where it's at in "phonetics"
  
  seomoz.org slash article slash search-ranking-factors
  
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miked

16 years ago

I'm not a SEO guru, but I have built websites for myself and for clients that get significant website traffic on a constant and consistant basis.

My recommendation:

Don't forget to focus on delivering great content.

It is the great content, reflected in your domain name, that gets reliable, daily search engine traffic. Build great content, and you make the search engines happy, and you make humans happy because they come to your website looking for something specific, and they find it.

I would suggest that you are starting backwards. A great domain name without any content...is just a domain. It is a keyword phrase. And that is not a business.

If you want to build a business, you should build an authority website, that has great content, and converts traffic to cash. The domain name is really an idea, a concept, a theme or niche.

Find what people are already looking for on the internet (keyword searches) and build a solid, quality, website to deliver awesome content. A few good backlinks, and Google will reward you with targeted traffic, and customers.

Google is your friend. They want the same thing you do - deliver quality, revelant content to visitors. Build a quality, revalent site, and watch the magic of sustained reliable traffic.

-Mike D.

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DavidTheMavin

16 years ago

Not a bad keyword, I was surprised to find some actual traffic for the exact term (in quotes) through the adwords kw tool:

KW Position in Adwords Cost Searches in Mar Ave Searches
[rock guitar lesson] 1 - 3 $0.96 1,300 720
[rock guitar lessons] 1 - 3 $1.28 2,900 1,900

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JohnMcCabe

16 years ago

Not trying to hijack the thread, but since there are some replies that appear to be from very knowledgeable people, I'd like to throw in a related question...

How much difference is there between these variations?

KeyWordPhrase.com

and

GenericNullDomainName.com/KeyWordPhrase

Will the SE ignore the domain name with no meaning and pick up the keyword phrase?

Thanks...

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4runner

16 years ago

Originally Posted by JohnMcCabe

Not trying to hijack the thread, but since there are some replies that appear to be from very knowledgeable people, I'd like to throw in a related question...

How much difference is there between these variations?

KeyWordPhrase.com

and

GenericNullDomainName.com/KeyWordPhrase

Will the SE ignore the domain name with no meaning and pick up the keyword phrase?

Thanks...

Hey John

in *my own* experiments, I don't have the keyword in the actual domain name at all, but I DO have it as the link url. For example, although outdated, I was ranked #1 and #2 with an indented listing (and 4,6 & 7) for the term "black hat is back 2" back in early February for Howie Schwartz' product. I haven't done anything since the launch so it has dropped off (still #2 and 3 in Canada and in position #3 in the USA), but this is just one example of many that I've used with various domains - with none of them having the keyword/phrase in the root domain name. These are also brand new domains with no age, but it has been shown that domain age does play a factor (see my post above)

So to compare the two methods, I've been equally as successful either way with neither one nor the other giving me "better" results - they bump around but always on the first page and I always make sure (or try to have) an indented listing.

I should also mention this method I've only used with self hosted wordpress blogs using a couple specific plugins and a few internal and external linking "tricks" (ie, external links are VERY important and where those links are coming from are even more important)

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Can someone explain? Targeting keywords in domains...

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