xSite Marketing

I just finished reading this great post from Rand of SEOmoz where he explains the 4 most significant factors for search engine rankings. (actually the comments and discussion are very amusing as well) SEO/SEM’s are aware of these and various combinations of other factors that contribute to a website’s page ranking, but this made me recall a little test I launched about 3-4 months ago.

The question I wanted to answer is, which is more effective; a domain/URL that includes the keywords to which I’m targeting OR a domain/URL that’s been online for 5-10 years. There are many other factors of course (relevant links, etc, etc) but I wanted to try a little test of my own. I spent a grand total of about 1-2 hrs putting up a one-page site (if ‘content is king’ – this site is a peon for sure). The URL is www.traveldealscanada.com. I put a bit of text in, title and metatags, and mostly it’s quite ‘spammy’ in my opinion. All it really contains is Google Adsense and some links to a few other websites.

Due to the URL ONLY (and keywords within) it recently appeared on the first page of Google and MSN for the term “travel deals canada”. Well “pretty obvious” some of you might say, but I think it’s interesting that it appeared on the first page along side some heavy-hitters like Expedia, Travelocity, Orbitz, Sears Travel, etc. This is the power of the web – where little guys can do business and compete with the big corporate players.

One other point, I added only ONE link to this one-page website from a PR5 page. The site itself still has a page rank of 0 but appears with the big guns. I realize this only appears on a SERP for one keyword phrase but there are 52 million competing sites and again, I did no work. So imagine what you could do with some hard work and focus? Now I’m not saying this is THE MOST important factor, but I think this shows that having just the right domain name could offer a lot of value even against a site that’s been around for some time.

(everyone else has these great little cartoons to illustrate their stories so I couldn’t resist! lol)