Domain names and the search engines
by Dee ButelandWhether you are buying a new domain to develop and to sell, or whether you want to build it to generate income, you should consider the use of search engine optimization in the development process.
Whether it is to make your site more valuable for a purchaser with regular traffic to its pages, or for the sake of your income (for which you also need steady, and hopefully growing levels of traffic), search engine optimization is needed unless you are simply going to promote by Pay Per Click.
You may have heard some SEO myths presented as fact. It is now established among the top SEO commentators that keywords in the domain name do not have any effect on the rankings in the results of site pages. The time is past where search engine algorithms could be conned by simple tricks like creating a domain called discount-keywords.com. Any internal page names, if they include keywords, may have some effect, though this too is unlikely.
So, when choosing a domain, you shouldn't worry when you find all the good domains are already taken. The search engine results listings will show the domain name to searchers, but that is the only possible benefit of keywords in a domain name.
Another myth is that using pay-per-click on your new domain will get it picked up, cause spidering, and give it a boost in the search engine rankings. This has been shown to be just not the case, and is the result of illogical thinking.
Get natural links from other sites, and the spiders will arrive naturally.
Include useful content, and the search engines will learn to love you. If you can't think of original content, get someone who can. The old ways of collecting web content – scraping, lifting pages from directories, and all the gray and black hat methods either don't work or will just set your site up for 1000th place in the listings.
Don't worry about keyword density, just create your pages on a natural, coherent subject. In fact, do not worry about the search engines at all. Your intention should be to give something worthwhile to your real audience – your actual visitors.
Trying to validate your new site to W3C standard is a total waste of your time. Google would have to exclude 99% of the web from its results if it used this for ranking. Use the time saved to create new pages.
Don't pay to place your new domain in paid directories, or directories selling PR-based links. This may have worked once, but the search engine algorithms no longer give much weight to tricks like this. Just consider – a cash-rich company could buy its way to the top of the results for every keyword it wanted, if paying for links actually worked: and it would just kill the value of the search engines to their users. This is exactly Google and the other engines want to prevent at all costs.
However, the search engine giants can make mistakes. Some websites, however fine and original their content and however natural their incoming links, just never do anything in the search results. Buy another domain and try again.