How can I use a keyword based domain to rank for my existing site?

[alex_pixelchefs]

Hi everyone,

From my understanding if your keywords are in your domain name it can help you rank for the keyword.

My site www.pixelchefs.com was affected from the latest Google Algorithm changes, as I used my main site as a testing ground for all my back linking. Our site was a single page with Jquery slide, late February the same time with the Google algo changes we uploaded our new site,  larger site with lots of pages and info. Result of that was that home page has PR3 and all other pages PR0. Well I don't really depend on Google for any work as most of my work comes from referrals.......but

While searching for names for my private page I came across the domain name www.DesignOrlando.com, The specific keyword gets 22,210 view per month according to Google analytics and also contains part of the keyword for all the keywords I am after.

I want to use the domain name for my main site but i am not sure what is the best way to forward the domain so Google can start reading my site as DesignOrlando.com

Any Suggestions will be very appreciated.

[alex_pixelchefs]

Hi Cyrus,

Thank you for your reply. I have actually removed all bad links from my site ( believe me was not easy) and I have created couple of good reliable links by creating good content. My site actually moved for most of keywords from page 8 and 9 to 1 to 3 and I am very happy about that.

After research I decided to actually create a second site advertising our lower end sites and also our print services.

Thank you for any help

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Alex, (nice looking website)

This is a really good question. There are a couple issues to address - let me touch each one of them individually.

Do keywords in your domain help you to rank? Yes, it certainly helps - although the power of exact match domains has fallen over time. There are several ways keywords in your domain can help you

• Possible higher CTR (clickthrough rate)
• *Possible higher rankings
• When you have keywords in your URL, it helps you to earn anchor text links that also contain those words, which in turn help you to rank

That said, recent evidence seems to suggest the power of keyword rich domains is not as strong of ranking factor as it used to be. http://www.theopenalgorithm.com/c...

The Google Keyword Tool is famously misleading. You want to make sure you're searching for "exact match" and "local monthly" searches to get an accurate estimate. Using these settings, you'll find a much, much smaller number for the number of estimated searches for almost any keyword. And that number includes all searches, whereas a #1 ranking usually gets less than 20% of all clicks. Sort of depressing, I know. ;(

You could migrate your old site to your new domain, but is it worth it to change? I can't answer that for certain. If you saw your rankings decrease because of a less-than-stellar backlink profile, then 301'ing your site to a new domain means you are most likely bringing your backlink profile with you.

Your new name (designorlando.com) will likely also be affected by these bad links if you redirect your old domain. It will not have an automatic ranking advantage just because of it's keyword richness. It will still take a lot of hard work to get it to rank.

It's possible, if you "burned" your old site, it may be easier simply to start over on a new one, without 301'ing anything. Either way, you'll have to build up new, high quality links, or clean up your old backlink profile.

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!

[alex_pixelchefs]

I already rank for my domain www.pixelchefs.com I dont want to lose the rankings for that . Can I treat the second domain as a new site and start adding in directories and some backlinking?

[Keszi]

Hi Alex,

Well if you own both domains and you have Google Webmasters Tools set up, then the process is quite easy:

1. Go to Google Webmaster Tools (GWT)
2. Site Configuration -> Change of address
3. Then check the following article: https://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=83105
4. Based on the article start up the change of address

Now you should be ok.

I hope that helped,

Istvan