Don���t rely on the Domain Name to Highlight Keywords
How many keywords or phrases can you fit in a domain name? The likelihood is just one, e.g. "software-product-development".
When optimising a new website or page, the general advice is to begin with 2 or 3 phrases to optimise for each page. Usually you will only be able to fit one phrase into the domain name itself, the remaining phrases will need to be contained within the text on the page. And, of course, the domain name will only truly apply to the website's homepage.
When writing your chosen phrases into a web page, don’t indulge in keyword stuffing, i.e. packing too many instances of the keyword into each paragraph of text. The idea is that the text on the page reads naturally. If it is obvious to a human reader that the text is describing a specific topic, e.g. developing software products, it will also be obvious to Google and Yahoo.
Sometimes you hear that you should aim for a particular keyword density on a page, such as 5%, in order to get the best possible result from search engines. This advice is now considered invalid - just write in a normal way so that the topic is obvious to a human reader.
When you’ve bought your domain and written your well-phrased homepage, what is the next step?
Well, if you take no steps, you probably still won’t do wonderfully well in search engine results. You’re in the position of shouting to the world that your page is all about a certain topic but without backlinks to reinforce your keywords, the search engines will think that no-one agrees with you.
So, the next step must be to get backlinks from other sites - and from other pages within your own site - with the link text matching your keywords. You then have the ingredients for a winning formula - your pages think they say something about a specific topic and the rest of the internet agrees.
There are lots of other factors that may affect how well you do in search results, e.g. how many backlinks you have, how old your domain is and how well optimised your competitors are. In general, search engines like older domains with more backlinks.
There is always the possibility of course that you perform very well for certain keywords but that few or no people search for them. If you find out that this is the case after you have chosen a domain name, it’s too late to change. For this reason alone, relying on the domain name as the foundation of search engine success can be a risky tactic.
About the authorSue Lawrence is owner and manager of SliQTools, a company specialising in the development of small business billing software.
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