Domain Names
What’s in a (domain) name?
There are two schools of thought on this: company branding vs. keywords. For a while, having your keywords as part of your domain name was pretty much the “SEO” way to go. But, with changes in how sites are indexed, it’s not longer necessary. Sometimes it is still a good idea, particularly if your company name isn’t available. Don’t go crazy with it.
You can still rank pages based on having a keyword as part of the URL (versus the domain name).
- ABCMarketing.com vs ABCSEOServices.com
- Instead of worrying about having SEO Services as part of the domain, you would create a page on your site specifically about SEO services, then you’d have a URL perhaps like: ABCMarketing.com/seo-services
As far as figuring out keywords to rank for, you must think like a customer. When you use Google or Bing or other search engines, what do you type in if you want to find a local business? When in doubt of what keywords to use, try using Google Keyword Tool. It will tell you the top phrases (keywords) that people are actually searching for in your line of business. There are some other free and paid search tools out there, but most people use Google for search, with Bing (and Yahoo) coming in second, so using their keyword tool will give you the most relevant results.