Exact Match or Aged Domain?
By admin | February 20, 2011
Yeah, I know. This particular post is a bit off from local-y type SEO because I am talking about affiliate marketing, but it can be applied to local markets.
Ok… you found a great product you want to become an affiliate for. Something that is a good solid product you can stand behind. Let’s say it’s a book and it deals with, I don’t know, Forex trading. You did the keyword research but the main keyword, “forex trading” has over 60 million highly optimized websites. Then you did your competition analysis to look for holes, and it looks pretty darn bleak. So you opt for a longtail that has some search volume to it… not as much as your main keyword, but it’s still high, around 2,000 searches per day.
Now your challenge is: Should you buy a new exact match domain name, or an aged non-exact match domain name.
The bottom line is that you want to rank it fast, so you’re going to have to look at the competition and see what domains rest in that top 10 (at least!). You’ll also have to head over to godaddy.com (or some other domain registrar) and find out how many iterations on your longtail keyword are taken. If it seems like just about all of them are taken and a lot of those are resting in the SERP’s, but you still found a .org, dashes between words and all… pass it by.
In my experience, exact match domain names will do well if the exact match domains in the SERP’s are under a certain level. In other words, if you find that the competition is low yet there are LOADS of websites with your keywords in the domain name, then opt for an aged domain and create a directory with your keyword in it.
How do you get a hold of an aged domain?? Head over to godaddy and check their bargain bin. What you want to look for are domains that have some PR to them, but be careful and check that the page rank is real! (I’ll do a post on that another time). Finding a PR 3 website in the bargain bin, buying it, then finding out that the page rank was spoofed – sucks!
Ok! You found a real PR 3 and it’s something random like theredbirdsings.com. BUY IT!
The reason why you want a high PR site, one that is aged say 4 years or so, is because you can beat the heck out of it with backlinks and not get sandboxed… it’s that old Google trust thing.
So build your site and create a directory: theredbirdsings.com/forex-trading-tips. You will rank much faster than buying a new one. Believe me!