Best PracticesOct 22nd, 2012

Domain Names and Online Marketing

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Getting the right domain name can make it much easier for you to get good search engine positioning. There are other strategies that you can employ, as well, that involve buying additional domain names. Some of these strategies have to do exclusively with online marketing and some of them have to do with reputation management, something that is increasingly becoming more important as a component of online marketing.

Keywords and domain names

Google does look for keywords and domain names, but there are some aspects of how the search engine does it that you need to be aware of when you select a domain name. If you want to get more than one keyword in your domain name, Google recognizes dashes, periods and slashes as separators between keywords. For example, if your site was called Purple-Electric-Cars.com, Google would recognize the keywords "purple", "electric" and "cars" in your domain. If your domain name was PurpleElectricCars.com, Google would not register the separate keywords.

Google does count domain names that have keywords in them as matches for relevant searches. There are a few different ways that you can utilize this fact to your advantage. 

1: Masthead domains

A masthead domain name is a domain name that matches your company name exactly or that matches the keywords that you're vying for exactly. This is the most desirable type of name to have, but because domain names are routinely bought up by people who have no intention of developing them and who only intend to sell them for inflated prices, it can sometimes be quite difficult to get the domain name you want. Try to get a domain name as close to the most important keyword for your site as possible. Remember the other top-level domains that you can choose from, such as.info, US and so forth, and these may allow you to get a master domain if the relevant .com name is taken.

2: Multiple domains

 Another strategy is to get alternate domains with your keywords in them and to use those to feed into your main site. The typical tactic is to fill up these alternate domains with content relevant to your site and relevant to the keywords listed in the domain name for the alternate site. This ends up creating a valid resource for those keywords and information related to them, which is what Google is looking for.

3: Variations

Online reputation management and online marketing are oftentimes very closely connected. Make certain that you get all of the common variations on your domain name so that you can control your image as much as possible. For example, if you are getting the Purple-Electric-Cars.com domain, you may also want to purchase PurpleElectricCars.com and similar domains as a way of making sure that your competitors could not erect sites at those domains and funnel traffic away from your site or use those domains to post negative content about your product or business.

If you need to develop additional sites at related domains, WordPress templates are great options for the job. They make it easy to build a professional-grade site in a very short amount of time. In fact, all you have to do in the vast majority of cases is install WordPress on the server, install the framework and theme on top of it and then fill it up with content. If you have a professional writing company produce a quantity of articles for you, WordPress can post them automatically at intervals, allowing you to build a site full of good content gradually, and in a way that may make search engines take notice and that may benefit your main site.


Olga Ionel is an original writer at ThemeFuse.com - a leader in the WordPress themes industry. She is fond of sharing SEO and blogging ideas.

Authored by

Steven Couture

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