Getting Free Traffic from Yahoo! UK With the Right Domain
Posted on February 25th, 2010 in Online Marketing & Promotion, Search Engine Optimisation.
Tags: domain names, file names, keyword domains, keyword rich, keywords in url, ranking, search engine positions, serps, urls, yahoo
It isn’t Google but it’s definitely something that’s not worth passing up if you are looking to get yourself noticed online
One of my many personas is a head SEO technician for some rather large accounts at a UK Search Engine Optimisation company and over the years have learned what works and how to get traffic to a site. So here’s an easy tip that costs almost nothing in both money and in time that will get you some free traffic from Yahoo – and, who knows, some enquiries…
Now, I can’t say I’ve done much in the way of promoting this site yet as it’s my first real stab at blogging. Anyway, one of the tricks you can use to show the search engines what your website is about is by using keywords in the domain name (URL) or the file name of your pages – and Yahoo loves it! They’ll be lapping you up!
Will Someone Please Think About the Search Engines?!
Think about it from the search engine’s perspective – a website that uses music promotion in the domain name will find it hard to publish information about anything too far from the subject of music promotion as it wouldn’t really appeal to the audience they are targeting. So, the search engines see a keyword, niche, industry or area of interest in the domain name and think that your site is likely to be closely related to that topic. This, along with similarly-related content, is likely to get you some trust within the search engines. And the more trust your site has the more confident the search engines are in sending people to your website – so they rank you higher. After all, why would they send people to an unrelated website with poor information?
Explanation
To explain what I mean a little, a website with a domain name like jesterstudios.com doesn’t really say anything. It could be a design studio, artist studio or recording, mastering, print or photo studio – even accommodation! It isn’t specific to anything and doesn’t really say much without visiting the site.
A website like musicmasteringservices.com or even an interior page with the name jesterstudios.com/music-mastering-services.html is much more specific and increases the confidence the search engines have in your website (or page) actually being about music mastering services.
Now this will help you in the major search engines in gaining better rankings under any keywords you are targeting to an extent, but – from my experience – Yahoo! loves keywords in domain names or file names and you can get some great exposure with relatively little work.
The Proof is in the Pudding
To demonstrate, I bought a keyword-specific domain name to try and capture enquiries from a particular niche for my music production services. I chose something along the lines of house-producer.com. I didn’t need any more than one page to test the water so I found a cheap, basic template for my site, wrote a page of content around house music production services and producers and uploaded the site.
I submitted it to a number of search engines including Google and Yahoo sp they found out about my site. I then went to various online business directories and added my site to around 50 of them and waited for the listings to be approved. Within 10-14 days I was straight in on the first page of Yahoo! for a good few related keywords that I’d otherwise have to work quite hard to rank for. Google is a lot slower at ranking hypenated domains but Yahoo… straight in there.
At the same time as doing this site, I also created another site for a similar but slightly different niche. I re-used the exact same template and wrote unique, fresh new content based around that style of music and the same happened.
Rinse and Repeat
It’s cheap, easy to do and cost me about £9 per website per year and within a week of being listed I had one enquiry through each website for less than £20 and a day’s (quite easy) work.
Obviously, this won’t work for more competitive niches as everyone will either have already purchased the best domain names or the competition is too high to get your foot in the door without a lot of leg work).
Give it a try. If you get it right it can result in bookings, enquiries and exposure for pennies and you can soon dominate your sector of the music industry online.
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