Choosing Domain Names: Keywords and Aged Names

Market Samurai has found a gold mine in the teaching of Kenny Goodman about choosing domain names. I’ve taken a few pointers from Kenny’s richer material. And yes, I wish I’d come across this a long time ago.

Note first that your domain name is a keyword and ranks as a keyword, whether as a broad, phrase, or exact match. If the searcher types in a keyword with a match to your domain name, an exact match, Market Samurai has found, seems to be a high playing card in the algorithm that ranks sites. Phrase and Broad match are also important, though proportionately less so.

The trouble is, most of the short tail keyword domain names are probably already taken in your niche, especially if the keyword has commercial value–meaning that people searching for that keyword are more likely to buy something directly associated with that keyword.

What to do? Two possibilities: (1) buy an existing domain name or (2) add a relevant prefix or suffix to the preferred short tail domain name. For example, choose “mybabytoys” or “babytoysreviews” if you can’t get “baby toys” — i.e., a broad or phrase match if you can’t get an exact match for a “baby toys” search.

With either possibility, Kenny would suggest buying an aged domain name instead of starting from ground zero with a new name so as to take advantage of the previous traffic building and ranking efforts of a former owner.

And the process of buying aged domain names introduces problems like how to find the names when they become available and how to recognize a good buy from a bad one. One does not want a domain name with a history of spamming or illegal activity. Or mere neglect or irrelevant content.

I suppose the bad news is that fishing for the best catch may take time and effort. The question is whether that is easier than starting to develop your new domain name’s online reputation from scratch.

Doing it the manual way, Kenny recommends checking the following auction sites for available names: Namejet.com, Snapnames.com, Afternic.com, Pool.com, Sedo.com, RickLatone.com, Bido.com, and Flippa.com. Kenny suggest making a bid 10 minutes before the deadline is ideal. Or sometimes one can find and contact site owners directly using Whois.net to make bids.

Once you have found a desirable name initially, check:
DomainTools.com – for domain name age
Archive.org – using the wayback machine for the history of domain names
Alexa.com & Compete.com – for an ideal of traffic and popularity
DMOZ.org & search.yahoo.com/dir – to see if listed
site:www.domainname.com – to find pages indexed on Google

Also check pagerank in browser with a browser application

Check for fake pagerank by typing in on Google “info:www.domainname.com” – if a different domain name shows up, it is forwarding to a higher pagerank domain and is thus fake.

In rare cases, trademarked domain names may cause you grief. In the US, check www.tess2.uspto.gov.

Or for a useful tool in the process, See Domain Samurai and/or join DN Forum.

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Tags: domain names, keywords