 People often ask me if setting a keyword is important for optimising a domain name and my response back is, "it depends". What do I mean by this? Setting a keyword for one parking company is entirely different from setting a keyword in another parking company.
For example, setting a keyword at Sedo can either involve setting the master keyword or a keyword for a particular country. The challenge on setting country keywords is that Sedo has some problems in their API for the encoding of keywords with accents on the letters. Words like café (with the accent) may be encoded as cafe (or sometimes something else entirely). In this simple example the earnings per click (EPC) for the two keywords could be like the difference between night and day. I'm sure that this issue will be addressed within the next six months.
Let's compare the Sedo experience to Domain Sponsor (wiki) where they don't set individual keywords but multiple key phrases. Although you can't set a key phrase for a specific country you can elect to have particular words excluded. The major challenge with setting a keyword in Domain Sponsor is the speed of their system is so slow that it will often time-out or require multiple clicking of the submit button to get the key phrase to be uploaded.
These two different platforms (Sedo and Domain Sponsor) provided entirely different results because of their fundamental different methodologies. One of the nice features of Sedo is the fact that you can set a keyword for a different country and in the language of that country. After optimising a lot of French domains I can assure you that Google language translator received a hefty workout, I just wished that I could get rid of characters with accents! By the way, if anyone from Sedo is reading this, can you please provide stats accessible from the API for each country and what people are clicking on etc.
I've only talked about two parking companies and you can begin to get a glimpse into the complexities surrounding keyword optimisation. For the past few years we've been tracking EPC trends for about 100,000 keywords and phrases across multiple parking companies. At ParkLogic we feel that this is vital for proper optimization. In order to compare two parking companies you will then need to normalise the data between them so that you're comparing apples with apples and oranges with oranges. This is will have to be the subject of a HUGE article in itself and left to another time.
What we have also seen is that it's often worthwhile misspelling a keyword as you would be surprised at the results. We've found that in some cases a misspelt keyword will produce outstanding results in an ongoing basis compared to correctly typed in keywords. I think that much of this relates to the fact that you're now no longer competing for the same pool of revenue as everyone else. To indicated the potential uplift I've seen a typoed keyword consistently achieve up to ten times the EPC rate as the correctly typed in keyword.
Keywords and key phrases are absolutely crucial to the optimisation process. Please feel free to share your experiences with keywording domains by clicking on one of the links below.
Forum: Keywords or keyphrase?
Wiki: keyword, keyphrase, Domain Sponsor, Sedo, ParkLogic
Trackback(0)
|
Article Archive 
TrackBack URI for this entry
Subscribe to this comment's feed
