I’ve never been one of those people who researches keywords and traffic stats to find a new niche. I tend to just build sites based on my interested a vague idea of what keywords I’d like to target and hope for the best. Picking keywords is a science to some people and there’s plenty written on the subject and plenty about it that I don’t know. One thing I do know, though, is that getting as many keywords as you can into your domain name (within reason) will go a long way towards a good ranking with Google.
The longest domain name I have is four words and a whopping 29 letters long. At first I thought it was a ridiculous choice but each word in the domain is one I wanted to target and I figured if it didn’t work then I could always register something else.
The result? After about six months of nothingness, the site now ranks number three with Google for those very competitive keywords plus comes up high for various combinations of those words. The site is very targeted and aimed at selling stuff and I’m finally starting to see some results. The words aren’t searched for a lot but when people find the site, the traffic is targeted and they tend to be in the mood to buy.
The domain name is a bit spammy looking but the site itself provides quality information, provides value to the user and just happens to have a bunch of affiliate links lurking within the content. There’s no way of knowing how well my site would have ranked without stacking the domain with keywords but I have a hunch that it’s been really helpful.
I guess a bit of proof that this might work is another site I have that has a long domain name made up of four keywords as well. This one only consists of one page and has zero inbound links. Despite having virtually no content and nothing to offer the reader except outbound affiliate links the site does well for the targeted keywords and ranks number 3 with Google.
As usual I don’t have anything concrete to back up my mad theory except for my personal experience. I don’t want to encourage people to start registering 10 word domains or anything but, so far, I’ve had some success with domains approaching 30 characters and, though long, Google seems to still like them and I like to keep Google happy!
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