Great question. How does a domain name affect your Search Engine rankings? What actually contributes to the value of a domain name? Let\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s take a look.<\/p>\n
1. Type-in Traffic
\nYears ago, many people didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t understand the difference between the URL (Uniform Resource Locater) or address of the actual website and the search window in Google. One goes directly to a particular website, like the address of a house. The other is an actual search. So people would just type in what they were looking for in the *address* field\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6i.e. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153new shoes\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. This is called type-in traffic.<\/p>\n
This meant that if you were lucky enough to buy a domain like \u00e2\u20ac\u0153newshoes.com\u00e2\u20ac\u009d for around $7.00 per year, you would automatically receive a respectable amount of traffic to that domain\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6type-in traffic. This would make the domain valuable, as it could be parked or used for an ecommerce shoe store\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6traffic equals money.<\/p>\n
It is 2010 now, people are more savvy. More people use the search window and they know that it is a search window. So, type-in traffic has diminished, not to mention that everyone is hip to domain ownership, any ones with any value have been bought up. Goddaddy.com even buys domains they feel will have high traffic and resells them to you and me at a premium price, this is a premium domain. By the way, they will quickly settle for 70% of the asking price if asked. Type-in traffic isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t what it used to be and domains are more expensive.<\/p>\n
Does it matter?
\nThe short answer is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153not much\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. Content is still king. Google works very hard to return relevant, high-quality results for it visitors. Look at Facebook.com, Google.com, yahoo.com, the domain can be anything. Can it help? Absolutely. If your domain contains your keywords you will get a little more love from Google and the search engines, but will it make or break your website? No. Shorter is better, descriptive is better. I recommend considering buying a premium domain, it is a good start.<\/p>\n
Domain name traffic
\nListen, I have owned a lot of domains, upwards of 450 at one point. I have purchased premium domains, acted as a domain broker for my clients, parked domains at different domain parking services like sedo.com, parked.com and many others. I have struggled to optimize over 150 landing pages in an effort to make a passive income\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6all with not much success, except learning a lot about how domains work.<\/p>\n
Look, there are many ways to measure traffic. All of my websites are built on a CMS and it has it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s own traffic stats. Well, I also use Google Analytics on all my sites. When I compare the numbers from both, they are different. There is no way to tell who is linking to your site, conclusively. There is no way to be 100% accurate on where the traffic is coming from. I have been a victim of a scam where you \u00e2\u20ac\u0153purchase traffic\u00e2\u20ac\u009d. The company explained that they had high-traffic websites\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6that were relevant\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6that you would get links from and traffic to your site. I found that that was not the case. Technically, I got traffic, but who knows where it came from. With all the traffic, I got not new customers and a very high bounce rate. The bottom line is: Don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t believe traffic reports, unless you are using Google Analytics and have personal access to the live Google Analytics account.<\/p>\n
Old domains
\nOne cool thing you can do is to check out archive.org . This site will let you see what a website looked like years ago. It will show you if there was a website associated with the domain you are looking at. If you want to see what your competitor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s site looked like back in \u00e2\u20ac\u02dc08 you can check it out. With old domains, you want to be careful. You want to know what kind of site it was, you don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t want to do a lot of back paddling in the first few months of your new domain\/website ownership. Type in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153link: yournewdomainname.com\u00e2\u20ac\u009d in Google, and it will show you how many links point to that domain, same thing using Yahoo!, I use both.<\/p>\n
Social Media<\/p>\n
With the current trend of savvy marketers using Facebook and YouTube.com as main forefronts on their marketing campaigns, this gives domain names even less value. It actually reduces the importance of the brands entire website. Toyota recently closed a national ad by giving the address of their YouTube.com channel, not their website address. This direction both diludes and broadens the company\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s marketing penetration, and for sure minimizes the impact of the domain on their website, as it would for any company.<\/p>\n
Appraise your domain<\/a> at domainappraisalking.com plus Buy and sell from domainers and submit portfolios of domain names<\/a><\/p>\n