As I’m pretty active on a few very popular webmaster message boards, every day I see various posts and reactions from webmaster and their various thoughts about domain names, especially thoughts about what domain names are good, what are bad and why. Mostly those comments are against long domain names, .net’s, domain names with hypens, numbers and so on.
I could agree with some of those comments and thoughts, but not fully. I would say that most webmasters are very wrong on the subject of picking what they believe are “perfect domain names”. Why do I say that?
Well, reason for me saying that is very simple. In general, common webmasters don’t know what to do with such a domain names. Most of them count only on direct type in traffic, don’t count on potential keywords in longer domain names, they are scare of losing type in traffic with .net domain names, believe that numbers in domain names are bad and so on. Are they right with those thoughts and scares? I would not say so. OK, maybe from one point of view they are right, but in most cases they are wrong. Why? Because every domain name with good popular keywords have great potential for receiving very nice traffic from search engines if all the search engine optimization (SEO) job is done correctly.
You see, every serious webmaster should count a lot on the traffic from search engines, and in that case the type of domain name is not that important. Of course, it counts a lot if domain name have keywords included, that is logic thing, but hypens, or numbers, or TLD extension like .net or .biz is not playing big role in that scenario. The SEO part is the most important thing and in most SEO resources you won’t see any serious comments that domain name with hypens or numbers, or .net extension is any worse than clear .com domain name.
The point of this article for sure is not SEO or anything related. I just wanted to give some facts about what is the most important for domain name to receive serious and highly targeted traffic.
The real point of this article is the fact that most of the good .net domain names are still free and available for registration, while the same .com’s are already registered. Most of the webmasters would say how that situation is very bad and there is no free domain names for them. That, of course, is not true! Very good .net domain names are free to register but webmasters are running away from them for various reasons, some of them are listed above. The conclusion is: those webmasters are really missing some very good domain names, good targeted traffic and lot more.
Very often I caught myself laughing when I see how webmasters are going after long, 3 or 4 keyword .com’s while shorter .net’s with better one or two words keywords are free, just because they are .net’s. Those webmasters are missing the point that SEO is much easier when you have better and exactly targeted domain name, no matter if it is .net or .com domain name.
Can I prove what I’m saying here? Of course I can! I have pretty big number of .net, .biz and .info domain names in my portfolio. Also have some .com domain names with numbers and hypens. Most of them are doing great just being parked, and those which are developed into live websites are doing even better with highly targeted traffic for specific keywords, and most of the traffic comes from search engines.
I don’t need to talk only about my domain names since there is a lot of domain names on first page of search engine results, on Google and other search engines, that are .net’s and other extensions, domain names with hypens or numbers, or even web pages targeted for particular keywords while domain name doesn’t have any relation to particular keyword.
For example, go on Google and Yahoo! and try to search for keyword „adult“. First result on Yahoo is domain name with hypen, and fourth result on Google is domain name 89.com, which even doesn’t have keyword „adult“ included and domain name consist of only two numbers. Plus, inside of first ten results on Yahoo there is .org domain name. And so on… there is a lot more of similar examples, for almost any keyword search phrase.
So, do you really think that .com domain name is a must have? Or would you agree with me that TLD extension of domain name is pretty irrelevant?
But, of course, SEO job is much easier to do when you have domain name with targeted keyword, so don’t wait too long before you decide to go and grab some of very good and highly targeted domain names with .net and other TLD extensions!
Posted: October 10th, 2008 under Valineo.com Business General.
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