The Keyword Domain Trap – Avoid Generic Domain Names, Pick Something Unique and Brandable

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The Keyword Domain Trap – Avoid Generic Domain Names, Pick Something Unique and Brandable

January 22nd, 2010 → 9:58 am @ The Naming Dude

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Is Men.com a good domain name? How about Furniture.com? Or what about Cars.com? The market place seems to think these are valuable. Men.com sold for 1.3 million. But is it? Are any of these really brands? Has anyone ever said to you “Dude you gotta check out www.furniture.com, it rocks!” or “I just love Men.com…what a great place to go for like, uh, men and stuff!”
How in the world would you market these names and how would you distinguish yourself from the thousands of variants, copycats and hucksters that will inevitably pop up. You can’t trademark a generic word, so forget about taking your competitors to court. You could spend millions advertising the domain only to have people walk away wondering if they were supposed to check out Man.com or Men.com. These generic literal names also carry another layer of baggage and that is in their meaning, or lack of meaning. Is Men.com about the concept of men like in gender studies. Is it about men from a biological point of view? Is it for women looking to find men? Is it for gay men or straight men? Fashion? Sports? Who knows, the name tells us nothing.

Multi-Word Generic Domains Are Often Worse.

Are you looking for health insurance? Do you know the difference between Ehealthinsurance.com, Healthinsurance.org, Healthinsurance.com, Healthinsurancefinders.com, Healthinsuranceinfo.net, Usinsuranceonline.com, Healthinsurancesort.com, Healthinsurance.net, Healthinsurancebrokeronline.com,  Reliablehealthinsurance.net, Findhealthinsurancequotes.net, Healthinsuranceall.com, Newhealthinsurance.com, Healthinsurance.info, 1sthealthinsurancequotes.com, and Healthinsurancebible.com? Do you care? Probably not. And you’re definitely not interested in spending the next fours hours trying to find out. However you do know that Blue Cross and Blue Shield sell insurance. Sounds like a safer bet.
Ah-ha, you say, Google has the same problem. There’s Googlewatch.org , Googlefight.com, and Googlesux.com just to name a few. Well, it may look like the same problem but it’s not. Google variants are different. Google is a unique and proper name. It stands for something and there is only one Google. They basically own the public mind space for the word “search” just as surely Kleenex own “tissues” and Xerox owns “copies”. So much so that all three of these companies names have also become a common shorthand for anything in their category. So for Google, any derivative reference used by competitors, critics and jokesters just reinforces the Google brand. Even a shirt that says “Google Sucks Ass’ enhances the Google brand.
This is not the same for Furniture.com. Variants of the word furniture just dilute the Furniture.com brand, not enhance it. That’s because furniture is a generic word. It doesn’t reference anything but the literal meaning of the word. And a boring word at that. Say it ten times and you’ll probably start to doze off.
No matter how many times someone uses the word furniture it will do nothing to enhance Furniture.com. It is not a brand and never will be. In fact, if someone were to ask you where they should look online to buy furniture, I bet you’d say something  like Ikea, Amazon, Ebay or even Craisglist. But not Furniture.com.

The Proof is in The Branding

Here’s a list of the highest priced domains of all time ( list provided by Fka200.com). How many of these own their category or are even a market leader? Almost none. When’s the last time someone sent you a link to one of these sites telling you gotta check it out? You probably can’t remember. Read each name and tell me the first thing that pops in your head. Except for AsSeenOnTV.com, HolidayInn.com, and iPhone.com which were already established brands, I bet the domain in question isn’t even in the top ten URLs you think of.

Insure.com – Sold for $16,000,000 (16 million dollars) in October 2009 to QuinStreet

Sex.com – Sold for: $14 million on January 19th, 2006

Fund.com – $9,999,950 – Sold in 2008

Porn.com – Sold for $9,000,000 sometime in 2007

Business.com – Sold for $7,500,000 in 1999 (This was pretty much a “business” sale with a developed name)

Diamonds.com – Sold for $7,500,000

Beer.com – Sold for $7,000,000

Casino.com – $5,500,000 – Sold to a private company in 2003

Toys.com $5.1M sold to Toys R Us

AsSeenOnTV.com – Sold for $5,100,000 in January of 2000

Korea.com – $5,000,000 – Sold in January of 2000

SEO.com – $5,000,000 – Sold in 2007

FreePorn.com – $4,000,000 – Sold in February 2008

YP.com – $3,850,000 – Sold to YellowPages.com

Shop.com – Sold for $3,500,000 in 2001

WorldWideWeb.com – $3,500,000 in 1996

AltaVista.com – $3,250,000

Software.com – $3,200,000

Candy.com – $3,000,000 Sold in March 2009 by Rich Schwartz. Deal was $3M + % sales.

CreditCheck.com – $3,000,000 -Sold in June 2007

Loans.com – $3,000,000

eShow.com – $3,000,000

Vodka.com – $3,000,000 Sold December 2006

HolidayInn.com – $3,000,000 Sold in 1995

Wine.com – Sold for $2,900,000 in September of 1999

Wines.com – $2,900,000

CreditCards.com – Sold for $2,750,000 in July 2004

Pizza.com – $2,605,000 April 3, 2008

Tom.com – $2,500,000

Dotnology.com – $2.5 million (2000)

Autos.com – $2,200,000

Computer.com – $2,200,000

Coupons.com – $2,200,000

England.com – $2,000,000

Celebrities.com – $2.0 million (1999)

Telephone.com – $2,000,000

Express.com – $2,000,000

Savings.com – $1,900,000

Mortgage.com – $1,800,000

Seniors.com – $1.8 million (2007)

DataRecovery.com – $1,659,000  Sold in 2008

Branson.com – $1,600,000

SolarEnergy.com – $1,600,000

Cameras.com – $1,500,000

TandBerg.com – $1,500,000

MarketingToday.com – $1,500,000

Deposit.com – $1,500,000

Russia.com – $1,500,000 November 26, 2009

Fly.com – $1,500,000 – RESOLD FOR $1,800,000 (January 2009)

VIP.com – Sold for $1,400,000 in September of 2005

Ad.com – Sold for $1,400,000 April 29, 2009 in TRAFFIC auction

Men.com – $1,320,000

Vista.com – $1,250,000

Ticket.com – Sold for $1,525,000 on Afternic

Feedback.com – $1,230,000

Phone.com – $1,200,000

Find.com – $1,200,000

Scores.com – $1.2 million (2007)

Kredit.de – $1,169,175

Call.com – $1,100,000 – Sold on August 31, 2009

Bingo.com – $1,100,000

Mercury.com – $1,100,000

Cruises.co.uk – $1,099,798 Sold in 2008

Chinese.com – $1,090,504 – Sold July 2007

WallStreet.com – $1,030,000

Rock.com – $1.03 million

Invest.com – $1,015,000  Sold in 2008

WebCam.com – $1,020,000 Sold April 2009 in Rick Latona auction

Vibrators.com – $1,000,000 Sold in 2008

Britain.com – $1,000,000

Fish.com – $1,000,000

Topix.com – $1,000,000

Sky.com – $1,000,000

If.com – $1,000,000

iPhone.com – $1.0 million (2007)

CyberWorks.com – $1.0 million

WhiteHouseCrisis.com – $1.0 million

eFlowers.com – $1.0 million

Beauty.cc – $1.0 million

Most of  these names are so dull, so forgettable, so uninspired, that it’s hard to believe they fetch the money they do. Sure, some were high traffic profitable sites when they sold, but many of these were simply parked domains with nothing but a coming soon page.

Another Perspective on Domain Names

Now let’s do another exercise. Here’s a list of categories and you pick the domain that best matches your perceptions as the proper place to go to.
Buy Books
A. www.buybooksontheweb.com
B. www.cheapbooks.com
C. www.amazon.com

Online Classifieds

A. www.onlineclassifieds.com
B. www.bestwayclassifieds.com
C. www.craigslist.com

Office Supplies

A. www.cheapofficesupplies.com
B. www.discountedofficesupply.com
C. www.staples.com

So was my test fair? Not really. I was obviously highly selective in the categories I used and the samples I picked. I did this to make a dramatic point about generic domains. Even if there were no Amazon, Borders or Powells on the web, do you think there’s any chance that www.buybooksontheweb.com could ever be a category leader? Of course not. Their completely literal, generic, keyword-rich domain name doomed them to an also ran from the get go. They could never be the leading online book seller under any circumstances. Not with a name like that.
Now how about the market leaders, are their names really so brilliant. Not necessarily brilliant, but most definitely better. Staples is a double meaning (staples as in a stapler and staples as in a basic supply). Craigslist is a proper name and highly relevant to its origins (it really was Craig’s List). Amazon was the riskiest name as it was already loaded with meaning. But it was also an exotic abstraction. The Amazon is big and holds the widest variety of plants and animals on the planet. To Americans, who don’t live near it and will probably never visit it in person, it’s mystical place far, far, away.
Could they have succeeded if they picked “Grand Canyon” or “Lake Tahoe” instead? Probably not. Those are very literal and require too great of a cognitive leap to map the idea “Grand Canyon” or “Lake Tahoe” to the biggest selection of  books in the world. Amazon was a risky choice but exponentially better and far more brandable than say Buybooksontheweb.com.

The 4 Exceptions to The “No Generic Keyword” Domain Name Rule

Making a Unique Name by Combining Two Generics

This first exception must be done with intelligence and an ear for the poetic. It’s highly effective and some of the best named and well branded web companies have used this naming device. And that is to combine two generic words in a way that is startling, evocative and original. Photobucket.com is a good example. By themselves the word photo and the word bucket are about as dull and generic as can be. Ah, but put them together and we not only have an original name now, but one that creates a deeper meaning. It immediately engages the mind as you envision first a literal bucket filled with photos and secondly the abstraction of a bucket of photos. On a symbolic level Photobucket is an easy way to gather all your photos. YouTube is a classic example. By themselves the words you and tube are nearly meaningless. Put them together and it not only has a great rhyming quality but it creates an instantly understandable, relatable word pairing loaded with meaning. It’s you (as in the everyday person, joe average) on the tube (television). Television that is about you. Brilliant. Other  good examples are LinkedIn, StubHub, FeedBurner and FaceBook. All pairings of generic words that take on a new meaning when combined.

Your Real Business Name is Already Generic So You’re Stuck With It

The second exception is that your brand name really is a generic. If your business really is called AAA Electrical then by all means, grab that domain if you can. Always get your business name when possible even if your business name is painfully generic. It would have been better if you never called yourself AAA Electrical in the first place, but the damage is done so you might as well go with it.

You’re a First Mover or Occupy an Obscure Niche Market

The third exception is being a first mover. If you invented something that didn’t exist before, something that people would probably like but don’t know it’s available, a generic may be a good strategy. A new client of mine invented or at least perfected the gopher basket. When people go to a garden shop they ask for gopher baskets. They don’t know who the market leader is and they don’t care. They just don’t want gophers killing their plants. His company name is actually Diggers and his unique design is called Root Guard. He’s an  industry leader and I bought and used his product years before meeting him. However his website is GopherBasket.com. It works because it’s a niche market, you may only purchase these once in a lifetime, and his brand name will probably never own the public mind space for that term. It’s just too oddball of a product. However, doing this with orange juice would be a mistake. People buy orange juice weekly. We’re surrounded by it. It’s almost a staple, everyone has an opinion about it, and it’s a highly contested field. So if your company is Minute Maid (a good name with a clever pun) then you should own and market MinuteMaid.com, not OrangeJuice.com which is completely useless and unbrandable but available for only $65,000.

You Don’t Have or Even Want a Brand Because You’re Just Trying Sell Commodities in a Saturated Market

The fourth exception is for the serial entrepreneur. Some people just don’t care. They just want to sell stuff and make money. Anything really. It doesn’t matter. If it doesn’t work out, they’ll just close shop and sell something else. If this is you then by all means go get a really long keyword rich domain. It will give you a little boost in the search engines and anyone who links to your URL is also simultaneously using your keywords in the anchor text. But if you have any aspirations to being a market leader, then skip the generic keyword domain.
File Under: Picking a Good Domain Name – Avoiding Generic Keyword Domain Names – Domain Naming Tips – Why Keyword Rich Domain Names Should be Avoided – Keyword Domain Names Suck


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Search engine marketing from Wikipedia

Search engine marketing (SEM) is a form of Internet marketing that involves the promotion of websites by increasing their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs) through the use of paid placement, contextual advertising, and paid inclusion.^[1] Depending on the context, SEM can be an umbrella term for various means of marketing a website including search engine optimization (SEO), which "optimizes" website content to achieve a higher ranking in search engine results pages, or it may contrast with SEO, focusing on only paid components.^[2]

Market

In 2008, North American advertisers spent US$13.5 billion on search engine marketing. The largest SEM vendors were Google AdWords, Yahoo! Search Marketing and Microsoft adCenter.^[1] As of 2006, SEM was growing much faster than traditional advertising and even other channels of online marketing.^[3] Because of the complex technology, a secondary "search marketing agency" market has evolved. Some marketers have difficulty understanding the intricacies of search engine marketing and choose to rely on third party agencies to manage their search marketing.

History

As the number of sites on the Web increased in the mid-to-late 90s, search engines started appearing to help people find information quickly. Search engines developed business models to finance their services, such as pay per click programs offered by Open Text^[4] in 1996 and then Goto.com^[5] in 1998. Goto.com later changed its name^[6] to Overture in 2001, and was purchased by Yahoo! in 2003, and now offers paid search opportunities for advertisers through Yahoo! Search Marketing. Google also began to offer advertisements on search results pages in 2000 through the Google AdWords program. By 2007, pay-per-click programs proved to be primary money-makers^[7] for search engines. In a market dominated by Google, in 2009 Yahoo! and Microsoft announced the intention to forge an alliance. The Yahoo! & Microsoft Search Alliance eventually received approval from regulators in the US and Europe in February 2010.^[8]
Search engine optimization consultants expanded their offerings to help businesses learn about and use the advertising opportunities offered by search engines, and new agencies focusing primarily upon marketing and advertising through search engines emerged. The term "Search Engine Marketing" was proposed by Danny Sullivan in 2001^[9] to cover the spectrum of activities involved in performing SEO, managing paid listings at the search engines, submitting sites to directories, and developing online marketing strategies for businesses, organizations, and individuals.

SEM methods and metrics

There are four categories of methods and metrics used to optimize websites through search engine marketing.^{[10][11][12][13]}

1. Keyword research and analysis involves three "steps:" (a) Ensuring the site can be indexed in the search engines; (b) finding the most relevant and popular keywords for the site and its products; and (c) using those keywords on the site in a way that will generate and convert traffic.
2. Website saturation and popularity, how much presence a website has on search engines, can be analyzed through the number of pages of the site that are indexed on search engines (saturation) and how many backlinks the site has (popularity). It requires your pages containing those keywords people are looking for and ensure that they rank high enough in search engine rankings. Most search engines include some form of link popularity in their ranking algorithms. The followings are major tools measuring various aspects of saturation and link popularity: Link Popularity, Top 10 Google Analysis, and Marketleap's Link Popularity and Search Engine Saturation.^[11]
3. Back end tools, including Web analytic tools and HTML validators, provide data on a website and its visitors and allow the success of a website to be measured. They range from simple traffic counters to tools that work with log files^[10] and to more sophisticated tools that are based on page tagging (putting JavaScript or an image on a page to track actions). These tools can deliver conversion-related information. There are three major tools used by EBSCO: (a) log file analyzing tool: WebTrends by NetiQ; (b) tag-based analytic programs WebSideStory's Hitbox; (c) transaction-based tool: TeaLeaf RealiTea. Validators check the invisible parts of websites, highlighting potential problems and many usability issues ensure your website meets W3C code standards. Try to use more than one HTML validator or spider simulator because each tests, highlights, and reports on slightly different aspects of your website.
4. Whois tools reveal the owners of various websites, and can provide valuable information relating to copyright and trademark issues.^[12]

Paid inclusion

Paid inclusion involves a search engine company charging fees for the inclusion of a website in their results pages. Also known as sponsored listings, paid inclusion products are provided by most search engine companies, the most notable being Google.
The fee structure is both a filter against superfluous submissions and a revenue generator. Typically, the fee covers an annual subscription for one webpage, which will automatically be catalogued on a regular basis. However, some companies are experimenting with non-subscription based fee structures where purchased listings are displayed permanently.^[14] A per-click fee may also apply. Each search engine is different. Some sites allow only paid inclusion, although these have had little success. More frequently, many search engines, like Yahoo!,^[15] mix paid inclusion (per-page and per-click fee) with results from web crawling. Others, like Google (and as of 2006, Ask.com^[16][17]), do not let webmasters pay to be in their search engine listing (advertisements are shown separately and labeled as such).
Some detractors of paid inclusion allege that it causes searches to return results based more on the economic standing of the interests of a web site, and less on the relevancy of that site to end-users.
Often the line between pay per click advertising and paid inclusion is debatable. Some have lobbied for any paid listings to be labeled as an advertisement, while defenders insist they are not actually ads since the webmasters do not control the content of the listing, its ranking, or even whether it is shown to any users. Another advantage of paid inclusion is that it allows site owners to specify particular schedules for crawling pages. In the general case, one has no control as to when their page will be crawled or added to a search engine index. Paid inclusion proves to be particularly useful for cases where pages are dynamically generated and frequently modified.
Paid inclusion is a search engine marketing method in itself, but also a tool of search engine optimization, since experts and firms can test out different approaches to improving ranking, and see the results often within a couple of days, instead of waiting weeks or months. Knowledge gained this way can be used to optimize other web pages, without paying the search engine company.

Comparison with SEO

SEM is the wider discipline that incorporates SEO. SEM includes both paid search results (Adwords) and organic search results (SEO). SEM uses AdWords,^[18] pay per click (particularly beneficial for local providers as it enables potential consumers to contact a company directly with one click), article submissions, advertising and making sure SEO has been done. A keyword analysis is performed for both SEO and SEM, but not necessarily at the same time. SEM and SEO both need to be monitored and updated frequently to reflect evolving best practices.
In some contexts, the term SEM is used exclusively to mean pay per click advertising,^[2] particularly in the commercial advertising and marketing communities which have a vested interest in this narrow definition. Such usage excludes the wider search marketing community that is engaged in other forms of SEM such as search engine optimization and search retargeting.
Another part of SEM is social media marketing (SMM). SMM is a type of marketing that involves exploiting social media to influence consumers that one company’s products and/or services are valuable.^[19] Some of the latest theoretical advances include search engine marketing management (SEMM). SEMM relates to activities including SEO but focuses on return on investment (ROI) management instead of relevant traffic building (as is the case of mainstream SEO). SEMM also integrates organic SEO, trying to achieve top ranking without using paid means of achieving top in search engines, and pay per click SEO. For example some of the attention is placed on the web page layout design and how content and information is displayed to the website visitor.

[edit] Ethical questions

Paid search advertising has not been without controversy, and the issue of how search engines present advertising on their search result pages has been the target of a series of studies and reports^[20][21][22] by Consumer Reports WebWatch. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also issued a letter^[23] in 2002 about the importance of disclosure of paid advertising on search engines, in response to a complaint from Commercial Alert, a consumer advocacy group with ties to Ralph Nader.
Another ethical controversy associated with search marketing has been the issue of trademark infringement. The debate as to whether third parties should have the right to bid on their competitors' brand names has been underway for years. In 2009 Google changed their policy, which formerly prohibited these tactics, allowing 3rd parties to bid on branded terms as long as their landing page in fact provides information on the trademarked term.^[24] Though the policy has been changed this continues to be a source of heated debate.^[25]
At the end of February 2011 many started to see that Google has started to penalize companies that are buying links for the purpose of passing off the rank. SEM has however nothing to do with link buying and focuses on organic SEO and PPC management.

Examples

A successful SEM project was undertaken by one of London’s top SEM companies involving AdWords. AdWords is recognised as a web-based advertising utensil since it adopts keywords which can deliver adverts explicitly to web users looking for information in respect to a certain product or service. This project is highly practical for advertisers as the project hinges on cost per click (CPC) pricing, thus the payment of the service only applies if their advert has been clicked on. SEM companies have embarked on AdWords projects as a way to publicize their SEM and SEO services. This promotion has helped their business elaborate, offering added value to consumers who endeavor to employ AdWords for promoting their products and services. One of the most successful approaches to the strategy of this project was to focus on making sure that PPC advertising funds were prudently invested. Moreover, SEM companies have described AdWords as a fine practical tool for increasing a consumer’s investment earnings on Internet advertising. The use of conversion tracking and Google Analytics tools was deemed to be practical for presenting to clients the performance of their canvass from click to conversion. AdWords project has enabled SEM companies to train their clients on the utensil and delivers better performance to the canvass. The assistance of AdWord canvass could contribute to the huge success in the growth of web traffic for a number of its consumer’s website, by as much as 250% in only nine months.^[18]
Another way Search Engine Marketing is managed is by contextual advertising. Here marketers place ads on other sites or portals that carry information relevant to their products so that the ads jump into the circle of vision of browsers who are seeking information from those sites. A successful SEM plan is the approach to capture the relationships amongst information searchers, businesses, and search engines. Search engines were not important to some industries in the past but over the past years, the use of search engines for accessing information has become vital to increase business opportunities.^[26] The use of SEM strategic tools for businesses such as tourism can attract potential consumers to view their products but it could also pose various challenges.^[26] These challenges could be the competition that companies face amongst their industry and other sources of information that could draw the attention of online consumers.^[26] To assist the combat of challenges, the main objective for businesses applying SEM is to improve and maintain their ranking as high as possible on SERPs so that they can gain visibility. Therefore search engines are adjusting and developing algorithms and the shifting criteria by which web pages are ranked sequentially to combat against search engine misuse and spamming, and to supply the most relevant information to searchers.^[26] This could enhance the relationship amongst information searchers, businesses, and search engines by understanding the strategies of marketing to attract business.

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WWW in Domains by semreach.com

You can access many sites with or without the “www” in front of the network name. You may have noticed that for SEM Reach, you can use www.semreach.com but if you use semreach.com, if redirects to www.semreach.com. Why? How does all this relate to SEO?
Components of a URL
Your URL (uniform resource locator) is made of separate parts, and when all collated together, packets of a site get sent to you, displaying a web page or such. Simply, this is what your URL is made of:
Protocol: http://
Host/Hostname: www.semreach.com
Subdomain: www
Network Name: semreach
TLD and/or Extension: .com
Relation to SEO
As you can see, SEM Reach uses all parts, including the subdomain of “www“. Ok, so how does all this relate to SEO? Well, “www.semreach.com” is just like “forums.semreach.com” or “blog.semreach.com“. Its another subdomain from the rest. However, the difference is that “www.semreach.com” is equivalent to “semreach.com” in terms of the content displayed. When you go to Google and search for a domain, you potentially will get two results for that web page. “www” and without “www“. You get two websites and therefore the two websites can rank differently in rankings.
You could get a PR5 for the “www” domain and a PR2 for the one without “www“. Its because people can link to your site with either domains and still get the same result. This has been a factor in the way your site performs where people only look at either of the domains.
How to fix this issue?
Its actually the simplest hacks you could do. Through your .htacess, you are doing a 301 redirect. The two options are:

Redirect domain.com to www.domain.com
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www.domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Redirect www.domain.com to domain.com
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^domain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://domain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

Be sure to change domain.com to your own domain.
Now whatever version you type into your search engine, or whatever others have linked your to, you will always get one result over the other. This can affect your site’s ranking performance over a long period of time.

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