Get Me Started

[sep]

Hi guys, I'm almost as new as can be to this site, my interests at the moment are picking domains, buying domains, parking domains and becoming an affiliate. I have done some reading on these subjects but there are certain things that remain obscure to me. I list here a number of questions which I'd be grateful for you to advice and comment on.

1- so I understand picking a good domain is about checking for its availability, and making sure they contain popular words and that it should be relevant to the product/topic that you are trying to promote. I've been playing around with the google adwords keyword tool getting an idea of the number of people that search for particular words or sequence of terms. I also understand that a lot of people guess at urls and so picking domains that you predict people will guess can get traffic to your site. But how can I do a similar search to see how many people guess at a particular url? or even how many people search for that url in a search engine? for instance if I'm thinking about buying the domain: word1word2word3.com , how can i find out if loads of people type this straight in the address bar or the search window? The reason I ask this is that I have found some fairly popularly searched terms and the domains are not taken. Most of these are multiple word search terms and clearly the domain is those same words with no spaces. So I want to know the value of having a highly searched sequence of words in a domain compared to paying for advertising those same words as your keywords with the search engine.

2-I gather SEO is key in getting your website close to the top of the search engine results based on your keywords, but going back to the above example, if I own the domain word1word2word3.com and somebody googles 'word1 word2 word3' , without SEO and in a fairly competitive market, is my page likely to be way at the bottom even though my domain contains the exact same terms and in the exact same order?


I'm sure more key questions will come up in my mind but getting these 2 answered will help a lot.

Thanks,
Sep

[delta4]

Hi Sep,

Welcome to EP. You ask a lot of questions related to keywords. My opinion: read this page and study everything that´s in there. It´s the best page for keyword beginner´s in my opinion.

[MrP]

Hello Sep, Welcome,

if I own the domain word1word2word3.com and somebody googles 'word1 word2 word3' , without SEO and in a fairly competitive market, is my page likely to be way at the bottom even though my domain contains the exact same terms and in the exact same order?

Although it's a good thing to have your keywords in your domain name, that's only a small part of the equation. Google and the other SE's will also take into account the quality and relevance of your sites/pages content. That though is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to where your site will rank.

My opinion: read this page and study everything that´s in there. It´s the best page for keyword beginner´s in my opinion.

Thanks for that delta4. I'm not a complete beginner - I've almost got one foot on the bottom rung. I think that post would be useful to almost every internet entrepreneur. It's always good to see how others approach different tasks.

[crabfoot]

I've almost got one foot on the bottom rung.

Wish I could say that - I always seem to be the one steadying the foot of the ladder.

@Sep - type-in traffic has always been a minor contribution to any profitable site's traffic, and unless you have an exact match domain name with one of the big keywords of a niche, it will make an insignificant contribution to overall traffic. It was more important in the past than it is today, and it was a minor effect even then.

There are much more important things to learn, like don't join Affiliate Programs until you have a site that gets around 500 visitors a month - and how to look around this site until you find the rationale behind that statement.

Just this week I've had a linkswapper asking me for swaps with two fairly useless aff sites in the weight loss niche (he wanted a UK bias in the links). One of the domains he is using is thecheapenvironmentalist(dot)net. While it is a PR 2 at the moment (it might not be later), the point to note is that this is a strange name to be using for weightloss. I might ignore the whole thing were it not that the domain registrant seems to be someone I know, and he is no fool in this niche. He evidently sees this site as part of a long term plan.
Face it, he'll have fun flipping it with a name like that ...

I gather SEO is key in getting your website close to the top of the search engine results based on your keywords, but . . . if I own the domain word1word2word3.com and somebody googles 'word1 word2 word3' , without SEO and in a fairly competitive market, is my page likely to be way at the bottom even though my domain contains the exact same terms and in the exact same order?

Three years ago, the domain match would get you on page 1 of Google. Up to two years ago, it would get a high position from the new domain boost. Nowadays, without SEO and link building, you'd be lucky to find it above page 20 in the search results.