What’s in a domain name?
What’s the value of a domain name, and does the name I get really matter?
Lately, I have been looking into the value of a domain name for search engine rankings, and optimization. I have been doing a few case studies of my own (that I will be getting to in later posts…) There are certain factors that give more weight to domain names, but what the actual domain name IS, could be the biggest factor.
For example: If you go to any search engine and type in “business know how” you will see the website http://www.businessknowhow.com come up #1 out of BILLIONS (yea, billions on Google) of sites. I have been testing the same thing on other sites and am getting very similar results. What does this mean? If you can find a domain name that is also a major keyphrase it will get good traffic by the domain name alone. (Yes, “business know how” is a searched out phrase) Its another reason the domain name http://www.business.com sold for over 7 million! (there was almost 2 million searches last month alone on Yahoo! for “business”)
I have found this true even with one of my websites Rocky Mountain Mattress, as when people search out that word it comes up #1 on every search engine I have tested. At the time when I created the website I had no idea that it was once an offline business (since out of business) and I still get alot of traffic from people typing in “rocky mountain mattress” I just got http://www.rockymountainmattress.com cause I really liked the domain name…I had originally got youroldbed.com but then realized that may not be a good fit for those wanting a new mattress…
Domain buying (or buying expired domains) is a business I have not really gotten into (though I should-its quite lucrative from what I read). There are people out there just sitting at domain auction sites all day waiting for certain domains to expire, and snagging them up for thier valuble In Bound Links (IBL) and Page Rank. Even if the site gets crawled and it found expired and you lose page rank, remember you still have the (IBL) that will get you traffic no matter what your page rank is.
When I first purchased the domain name of this site you are on http://www.eplanit.biz I did not take anything into consideration. I was not a good domain name buyer I hate to admit! But in the 4 years I have owned the domain name I have huge IBL, and great ILQ (Inbound Link Quality) so it would be a great domain for anyone to get for the PR and Links alone. These are the kind of sites the domain hunters are looking for. So you would buy this one for that reason and not the name. I hope I am making sense.
Getting back to the value of expiring domain names … I don’t think Google will take away the PR until the domain is actually expired, and gone beyond the 45 day grace period (allowed by ICANN), but you will never lose those IBL coming to the domain (if you act quick). It would be pretty easy to get the page rank back up once you own it and get your content on it!
To sum it all up, you can purchase domains for two reasons:
- The name (if its a major searched for word you will get good rankings automatically)
- The IBL (In bound links)
Both of these reasons will get you good traffic, and anytime you can purchase an established domain name instead of buying a new domain its better (long and short term). I hope all this makes sense, but it was a long rant for one simple phrase: “The domain name you purchase does matter.”
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