Should my domain name contain as many keywords as humanily possible?

Hi,

I was just wondering if my domain name should contain as many keywords as possible that my site is about. Does this help with rank in Google and other search engines?

Also, how many <h1> and <h2> tags should I have on a given page to emphasize the page's topic?


Thankss

 

Ok, here is a little experiment I did. My wife and I are adopting, and our adoption website is http://www.schrockfamily.com. I optimized the page for keywords Nebraska Open Adoption.

Then I reserved the URL www.nebraskaopenadoption.com and redirected it to our schrockfamily site with a meta refresh.

Almost overnight, the nebraskaopenadoption.com site was #1 in Google for those key words. After a bit, Google figured out the redirect, and now schrockfamily.com is #1.

So in a word, yes. Use as many key words as possible without sacrificing the readability of your url. digitalpointseokeywordoptimizewebmastertools.com would be a bit much if you get my drift ;-)

 

Thanks for the input guys. My site will essentially be a site targeting a niche, that will sell some affiliate products.

Aaron... let me ask you a question... I've been reading your niche site over and over the past day or so, and I was just wondering how you can verify what you think may be a niche.

I've been using NicheTaxi to enter variations of keywords, and found some that were considered "brilliant" niches--but yielded only 10,000 searches a month, according to NicheTaxi.

I'm not sure how many potential searches a month I should be aiming for with a niche site.

Also, are there any other good resources for devloping a niche site?

Thanks for your help!

 

Don't use more than one h1 tag per page.

You can use the keyword tool on digital point to get an idea of searches per day. How many searches depends on the keyword competition and what it pays per click. 10K per month isn't highly competitive, but if you can rank well for it and it pays well, then you can do very well. Some focused niches pay in the dollars, even over $10, but how you will do depends on the amount of time you are willing to put into a site. It can take a long time for google to rank some competitive keywords on a new site, so don't expect it to happen overnight.

 

Two more questions:

Do search engines prefer .com's over .info's and

Does it help or is it recommended to register several domains that redirect to the one main domain?

Thanks again

 

You can find the answer to all your questions by doing a search as they have been asked hundreds of times before, but:

1) No. Makes no difference at all.

2) No. Not unless the other domain gets type-in traffic.

 

Do hyphens actually make that much difference??

Dont search engines simply see them as <space>?

Would be interested in your comments

 

Yes, hyphens make a difference, and yes, search engines see them as a space. As an example, if your base keyword were "best tv shows", here's how a search engine would read the following domain name examples:

www .besttvshows.com = "besttvshows"

www .best-tv-shows.com = "best tv shows"

HTH,
Sam

 

So using hyphens obviously makes it easier for a human to read AND easier to misspell your domain.

Using hyphens helps search engines 'read' the domain too if you are targetting a specific keyword\phrase?

 

Yes on both counts. Unfortunately, what works best for SEO and what works best for human visitors are sometimes not the same. Whenever this is the case, I err on the side of human visitors.

One other thing to keep in mind: If your strategy is based on gaining most of your visitors through the search engines, then they don't need to type in the URL - they can simply click on the link in the SERPs.

Sam