Keywords, Domain Name and Site Structure | SEO Tuesday
Welcome to Week 2 of SEO Tuesday
Did you miss last weeks post? Check it out, Intro to SEO Tuesday
Domain Name Selection
This is interesting because you can go a couple ways. One way is to try and brand a name and another way is to try and get your keywords into the domain name. Pick any way you want, but I feel that trying to brand your name will help you more in the future, and with some proper SEO you can rank for your keywords as well. Domain names are not the only SEO factor that Google will look at, so you shouldn’t focus to heavy on getting a keyword happy domain name, IMO.
I decided to try and own my name, which will be hard considering there is a musician and baseball player who share my name. But, using good search engine optimization I am able to rank for some keywords that I want.
So we will get back to domain selection in a minute, we now need to think about keywords.
Keyword Selection
For those of you who are not like me and would rather have a domain name related to your keywords, then we need to find out some information about those keywords first.
I am branding my name, but I still have keywords that I want to rank for.
Let’s make sure you are not losing relevant traffic by researching your target keywords. This is an extremely important step, because your keywords will help build your site structure later.
The first thing you should know is that you don’t really know what your visitor’s will type into Google to find your site. So you should ask around, use your friends and family. Find people that you work with and ask them how would they try to find your site. Doing this will help you build a good list of keywords and phrases that you can use to see what the average traffic is.
Keyword Tools
Google Keyword Tool – A very powerful tool that will allow you to type in your main keyword and it will show your related searches, monthly search volume as well as global monthly search volume. If my main keyword was “costa rica”, I would see these results;
You can see that the term “costa rica” received 5,000,000 searches in July and on average has 7.4 million searches per month. A hard term to rank for, but let’s see what else they give us. We have “hotels costa rica” and “travel costa rica” which both receive over 250 thousand searches per month. I think we should shoot for these terms as well. So far we have;
- Costa Rica (main term)
- Hotels Costa Rica (secondary term)
- Travel Costa Rica (tertiary term)
WordTracker Keyword Suggestion Tool – Now we can use this free tool to get some daily details on the search terms. We could also use our other 2 terms to see what is related to them. Can you see how we are building the structure yet?
In today’s results “costa rica travel” is right there, great that it is our secondary term. Now we have a couple more to add to the list;
- Costa Rica Vacations
- Costa Rica Honeymoon
- Costa Rica Real Estate
- Costa Rica Fishing
This is a great start, so let’s return to domain selection. Now you have a list of keywords to help you select a domain name. Try to select something with your main keyword in it if you can. Different combination’s are okay. Using “costa rica”, something like thecostarica.com or the-costarica.com. Let’s think about site structure now.
Site Structure for SEO
Keyword Domain – If you opt for a keyword domain, they you would try to have something like this;
- http://KEYWORD.com/KEYWORD2
- http://KEYWORD.com/KEYWORD3
- http://KEYWORD.com/KEYWORD4
Having your main keyword in the domain should carry some weight to the rest, so using “costa rica” as an example again I could have something like;
- http://thecostarica.com/travel
- http://thecostarica.com/hotels
- http://thecostarica.com/vacations
Where each of these links are to pages with relevant content about that keyword. You can take it one step further and search the keyword tools using the other keywords to get more keywords related specifically to that. Then you can create sub-pages relevant to that content.
Branding Domain – If you opt for a branding domain, they you would try to have something like this;
- http://BRANDING.com/keyword1
- http://BRANDING.com/keyword2
- http://BRANDING.com/keyword3
With branding you are one step behind, but not really. Google is smart and they will see that you are a “name”. Then can then recognize what you site is about and rank you for that. Getting back-links is another important step we will cover in later weeks, but will help you rank for keywords.
Putting all this information together before running out to purchase a domain name will save your time in the future.
Do you have any useful tools to add? I am always looking for new information..
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I think keyword tools are very underused by those who aren’t familiar much with SEO. That’s too bad because they are very useful.
I’d suggest that since we’re talking about domain names, it is also important to get the correct TLD for your website’s target geographic location.
For example, if your target audience is in Canada, make sure to get a .ca domain extension (i.e. yoursite.ca instead of yoursite.com). If your target audience is worldwide, I’d say stick with the .com
@John : Almost 1,000 words and I knew I was forgetting a few things. Thanks!
that’s all good and well if you have relevant content.
unfortunately, i only publish irrelevant stuff.
@Seraphine : making you one of the lucky ones! Doing it because you want to means you have already won.
:)
I’m thinking its worth noting that in order to do constructive research one should get the best browser in the world, Firefox, and then get the #1 plugin for it, SEO Quake. Great asset to have in your SEO toolbelt.
Costa Rica Property
@CRP : Firefox is a must in my book. I don’t use SEO Quake anymore, but it was nice when I used it.
well i have been using firefox for quite some time and this new tool that u suggest when put into use really helped ease my work.
@Alice : Kudos, Firefox is the way to go. I use Chrome and FF daily. Fuck IE