When people search on a term in Google it is called an “exact match” search. In other words, if you search on the term “dog training,” Google will do its best to show you all the pages where there is an exact match to the term “dog training.”
It is important to know this because the perfect domain name would be the exact name of the search term that you want to rank highly in Google – its first page. In other words, if you want to build a site around “dog training,” the best way to get traffic is to have the domain name www.dogtraining.com.
Dead on arrival
If you choose the wrong domain name, you website could be DOA – dead on arrival-with no or very few visitors. Suppose, for example, you were to create a site on Labrador Retriever dog training but chose the domain name, greatdogtraining.com. In this case you could likely get zero visitors interested specifically in training Labrador Retrievers.
Long gone
The problem is that exact match domain names like dogtraining.com are long gone. So, too, are names like dogtraining.net, dogtraining.org and dogtraining.info. In short, you won’t be able to get an exact match for the keyword “dog training.” This is true of many, many keywords – they were all gobbled up many years ago.
What to do, what to do?
There is a free program called Domain Samurai (www.domainsamurai.com) that you can download to your computer. This tool will save you literally hours of frustrated and pointless searching for an exact match domain name.
What Domain Samurai does
After you open the program, you type in your seed keyword or keywords. For example, if you want to get a domain titled “Labrador dog training,” you would type this term into the search box and then click on Find Domains. You might also include search terms such as hunting dog training or training Labrador hunting dogs.
Domain Samurai will then display all the available domain name variations on the keyword “labrador dog training.” In this example, you would find that the domain name www.labradordogtgraining.com,.net or.org is not available. But you could get the domain name www.huntingdogtraining.net. Given this, www.huntingdogtraining.net might be a good choice.
When you can’t get an exact match
If you are totally committed to the idea of building a site around a term where you can’t get an exact mach on dot.com, dot net, dot org or dot info (which, incidentally is considered by many smart marketers to be a poor choice), Domain Samurai still has the answer.
It will show you alternative domain names with what are called stop words. Common stop words are e, the, and my. They are called stop words for reasons that I don’t understand but the thing is, Google does not recognize them. In other words, the domain name www.elabradordogtraining.com is just about as good an exact match as www.labradodogtraining.com.
Add a suffix
Domain Samurai will also show you variations on your search term with suffixes such as www. labradordogtrainingsite.com or www.labradordogtrainingblog.com.
In fact, Domain Samurai will show you dozens of alternative domain names and will also rank them in terms of their density or the percentage of the domain name that has the keyword. In this example, www.elabradordogtraining.com rates a 95%, while www.labradordogtrainingsite.org scores just 83%. So, www.elabradordogtraining.com would probably be a better choice.
In short Domain Samurai is a great, free tool that can save you hours of searching for a domain name and can help you find one that is either an exact match to your search term or one that is darn close.
