This is a guest post from Wes Young.

Recently we discussed Tabke’s 26 steps on Poker Affiliate Radio and one of the steps we disagreed with was the URL of a web site should focus on brandability. In our opinion a domain name should focus on keywords first and brandability second. Below I am going to explain why using keywords in your domain name is a good practice, show you exactly how I judge the usefulness of specific keywords and keyword phrases, and show you a specific example I recently used for a business decision.

One of the basic search engine optimization techniques is to use the keywords you are targeting in the URL of the page. This tells the search engines what your page is about, or at the very least helps reinforce what you page is about. This can be done with both your base domain name as well as by using descriptive names for your files or folders.

For example, on a site I recently launched, I wanted to focus on the phrase “casino game online”. I was able to acquire the domain www.casinogameonline.org that works perfectly for my main keyword phrase. I continued to utilize this technique by focusing on a sub set of my main keyword with pages like www.casinogameonline.org/blackjack/ where I target the keyword phrase “blackjack game online”. As you can see all three words of the target are included in the URL.

The tool I use most to determine the best keywords to focus on is the Google Adwords keyword tool found at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal. You type in your keyword or keyword phrase, hit the get keyword ideas button and a list of results and estimated monthly searches displays down the page. Then change the match type to exact and you can get a very good idea of just exactly how many searches are made using Google each month using the exact keyword phrase. This also gives you a very good idea of how much traffic you can expect if you are able to rank number one in Google for the keyword you are targeting.

I had the opportunity to buy two different domains, but had decided that I would only spend the money on one or the other. (They were both in the aftermarket, so they were more expensive than just a hand registration.) The two domains were internettexasholdem.org and baccaratrules.net. On the surface it would seem that internettexasholdem would be a much better choice because it is common knowledge that poker is more popular than baccarat. However, using the Adwords tool you can see why baccaratrules is a better choice. There is an average of 320 exact matches per month for the phrase Internet Texas holdem and 590 for baccarat rules. In addition, if you do a Google search for both phrases, it will require much more work to rank number one for Internet Texas holdem than it will for baccarat rules. All of this does not say that internettexasholdem.org is a bad domain name. It does show how you can use the tools at your disposal to make monetary and business decisions.

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