Weekend SEO - Practical Guide - Keyword rich domain name

This article helps you to choose a keyword rich domain name for your blog or website.

By the way, What is keyword rich domain ??

Keyword rich domains are the domains that includes good keywords in it.

Why do we need keyword rich domains ??

Keyword rich domains are useful from two aspects :

• These domains are very easy to remember from user point of view as the domain name contains the words familiar to the user.
• Think about the words (search keywords) users would type to find your pages and make sure that your blog or website actually includes those words in it. Search engines gives more weightage to these domains so it a powerful factor to rank higher with less time & effort from Search Engine / Search Engine Optimization perpsective.

Example: The following samples [popular websites] picked from web are either easy to remember OR contains search keywords OR both.
(a) Ask.com is the #1 question answering service that delivers the best answers from the web and real people - all in one place.
- This domain name is short, simple (easy to remember), meaningful and the domain name 'Ask' itself is the good search keyword that search engines respect it.

(b) WikiTravel.org is the Open source travel guide featuring up-to-date information on attractions, hotels, restaurants, travel tips and more.
- This domain contains two keywords wiki + travel which is easy to remember and both the keywords exist in the domain name so there is no doubt that these kind of domains rank higher from search engine viewpoint.

How can I find keyword rich domains and from where ??

I've compiled a list of websites that helps you to choose a domain and some of them are intelligent to suggest you based on your keywords. Personally my favorite one among the entire list is www.psychicwhois.com as it is quick, ajax based (results are instant as soon as you type) and very simple to use to find keyword rich domains.

Reference : My Bookmarks Collection - Get Keyword Rich Domain Name Suggestions

My Personal Experience w.r.t choosing a keyword rich domain ??

I was looking for a common platform to share my thoughts & experience w.r.t SEO, Blogging, Social Networking, Random thoughts, Ideas, Reviews, Domains, Keywords, Local Search, Personal Development, etc. Then I thought of starting a blog site. Being a webmaster for couple of websites, I thought of owning a domain. Then I laid down the following rules:

• Domain name should be easy to remember
• Domain name should contain search keywords
• Domain name should convey my message to the end-user(s).
• Strictly .com TLD (top-level-domain) only.
• Try to keep the domain name short & sweet, if possible.

Based on the rules, I started listing a domain names one by one. Some of them are listed with the help of domain name suggestion tools and the remaining ones are just a random guess. Initially I was happy that I made a big list of nice domains but the truth is majority of the domains from my list are already owned by someone else. Some of the domain names of my interest were available in non-.com TLDs so I just ignored it. Finally I drill-down to the domain name with 3 keywords 'Sharing', 'Blog' & 'Ideas'. Luckily no one has taken 'www.SharingBlogIdeas.com' but initially I was little hesitant to register it since it was matching all my rules except the last one i.e. try to keep the domain name short. However, finally I took a decision and bought the following domain in the year 2008 as most of my requirements are met :

www.SharingBlogIdeas.com - Sharing Blog Ideas!

This site came to the top in the major search engines within 2-3 weeks without much effort i.e with less links, less articles, less SEO effort. That's the power of keyword rich domain names.

"Weekend SEO is a unique place to share the experiments that I did w.r.t SEO". - Nanda Kishor