A simple, but very good question was asked in my office the other day: What's better, buying lots of domain names to match the exact keyword you want to target, or creating multiple pages on one single-domain website to target individual keywords.I have to assume that the person asking would expect to focus all the content on each website to match those specific domain names.
This is a topic of much discussion among business owners as they begin their initial education in search engine optimization. There's a lot of information online about "Exact Match Domains," or EMD for short.
Prior to October 2012, you would be able to rank more highly in the search results if your domain name matched the exact phrase that someone was searching for. For example, a search for "diamond halo ring" would frequently return top ranking for the website diamondhaloring.com.
The practice became highly abused and many spammy internet companies were creating hundreds of very small, practically worthless websites for every 2 or 3 word phrases. Here are 3 more examples:
blackdiamondring.com
engagementrings.com
cushioncutdiamonds.com
weddingrings.com
At the time of this writing, those 4 websites are nothing more than placeholders; but between 2005 and 2008, they were thriving jewelry sites because of their exact match names. All the search engines were sending them a lot of traffic.
Today the power of the EMD isn't nearly as good. In fact, you're lucky if Google even ranks EMD websites at all except for company names that exactly match their domain.
In order to rank your website you need good content on your website that matches the keywords you want to target. So the answer to the question is to write a lot of good content for your website and forget about what the domain name says.
Admittedly, there are times when it is good to own the exact match domains, and they can be good for marketing and tracking purposes. Here's an example:
The domain engagementrings.com is for sale. If I bought the domain I would forward all the traffic to my store's regular domain, like perosijewelers.com. I would not allow the search engines to read the EMD, but simply forward all real people to the usuallwebsite. Then I would use the domain name engagementrings.com in my marketing because it will resonate faster with new potential customers than the domain name that matches my store name.
The bottom line of today's Daily Golden Nugget is just a simple reminder that good content on your website, perhaps through extensive blogging, is the better way to increase your SERP ranking. Skip the exact match domains unless you are using them in purposeful marketing.
