Now one of the points a mentioned was about choosing a domain name, i stated that you should not stress too much about this as i have found that including your keywords in your domain has little effect on your blogs search engine ranking and you should concentrate more on layout, content and back links. This still stands however literally minutes after writing that post last night i had a very interesting conversation with a friend that has made me look at domain names in a whole new light.
A good family friend came round last night, i told him i just had to finish the post that i was writing, he asked what it was about and i explained about this blog i was writing about how to get your blog noticed and getting free traffic etc.. My friend has very little Internet knowledge and absolutely no Seo experience so i thought what a great opportunity to find out how a clueless Internet user would search for something they were looking for. He started to tell me step by step how he would search for something on the Internet so i thought i would share it with you, after reading his technique you will see why i am today writing this post about choosing a good domain name and why i have suddenly took a different view on how to choose them.
Here's how an inexperienced Internet user searches for keywords
My friend typed Google.com in the search bar and brought up a Google search bar
He then typed in what he was looking for 'buying property in Spain'
Google displayed 441,000 results for his phrase
I then asked him which one he would click on and his answer surprised me, he said the top highlighted ones (which me and you know to be Google ads) must be highlighted because they have paid to be featured and for some reason he is impelled not to click, so my friend as a newbie to the net does not click on ads.
He is then left with the first page of organic search engine results and i asked him which one he would click on, "is it the one with the catchy title?" i asked, "no" he said, he explained how he chooses which site he wants to view and it is the one with the domain name that is most rel event.
This really surprised me and i asked him why, he said that the site with a domain name that is most relevent to his search would be the most useful to him, he said is a site is purely about his search term of buying property in Spain then he would be able to get the best information from that site. He went on to tell me an example, he said take Manchester united for example, if i type in Manchester united he would click on the website Manchesterunited.com because all other sites would be imitation sites. This was really interesting, i explained to him how webmasters often struggle choosing a good domain name as most are already taken and what if he was missing out on a good site by only clicking on the ones that appear to be sole about his keyword, he said if a webmaster knew enough info about the topic then he wouldn't make his website about anything but the topic and he would ensure the domain name reflects the topic, otherwise it would just be a site about loads of topics covered briefly.
How to Choose a Domain Name
After having this conversation and hearing how a genuine internet user with no knowledge of search engines would search for keywords i have come to the conclusion that although having your keywords in your domain name wont really get you higher search engien ranking but it will increase your chances of getting more visitors.
