Niche Site Income Pt 5: Choosing a URL that Will Get You Ranked

One of the easiest things you can do to help get fast, free traffic to a new niche site is choose the right web address.
Some careful thought before grabbing web hosting and launching a site will increase the chances that you get ranked this month rather thank next year.
It’s also helps increase the chances that you end up on the first page or two rather than down in traffic-less purgatory.
So what’s the secret to a good URL?

Getting Some Google Love

It’s important to realize that there’s no guaranteed magic bullet when it comes to getting ranked. The trick is to stack as many factors in your favor as you can to increase your chances of search traffic. Getting the right URL is one of those factors. Choose a  URL that has the exact keyword phrase in it that you want to rank for. This has proven to be a rank a site quickly, especially for a hyper-targeted phrase that is not overly competitive.
There’s some debate as to whether a keyword-based URL still has the same benefit. It’s certainly possible that Google has lowered the impact this strategy has.
But for now it still works at least to some degree. I say, if it give you one more leg up then why not do it. In my experience it really helps.

How to Find a URL When All the Good Ones are Taken

When we started Internet Business Mastery, we knew we wanted to rank for the phrase internet business. We included it in our brand name as well as our web address.
Before launching my podcasting site, I figured out the top phrase that people searched for in my niche was how to podcast.
The ideal URL for this phrase would have been HowToPodcast.com. Sadly, that was already taken. This will often be the case for hot keyword phrases.
Fortunately you get the same benefit even if you add a word to the end of the phrase. For example, we added the word mastery to Internet business to get InternetBusinessMastery.com.
For my podcasting site I added the word tutorial to how to podcast. You might notice this gave me a URL that targeted two phrases: how to podcast and podcast tutorial. So my URL is: How-To-Podcast-Tutorial.com.

To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate

I get asked a lot about the hyphens. In 2005 when I launched the site, there was a lot of talk about using hyphens to help each keyword stand out more to Google. There’s no longer any benefit to this. Luckily I own the non-hyphenated version of the URL. I’ll change the site over to that in the near future.
The bottom line is don’t use hyphens. It’s seems to hinder more than help now.
But What About the Brand?
Another direction to go is to create a brand-based name and URL instead of keyword-based. Examples of niche sites with brand-style URLs are:

• Money Crush
• Bodhimed
• PuttyLike

Incidentally, these sites are are all from Internet Business Mastery students.
None of these addresses contain a primary keyword phrase for the purpose of ranking. Rather, the site creators have gone for catchy brand-based names.
In the last post I talked about three money-making models: ads, affiliate and original products. If your plan is to build an authoritative site that is a top resource in your niche, then it’s entirely valid (and maybe even better) to choose a URL that has brand power.
But if the goal is to get fast traffic for a micro-niche site that makes money from AdSense or other ads, then a keyword-based web address is much more important.
The reason is that it’s not likely to be worth your time to do other traffic generation. So it’s important to stack every search engine factor in your favor early on to get faster cash flow.
So when choosing your URL keep in mind the long-term goals of your site.
An ideal URL is a hybrid of the brand and keyword approach. InternetBusinessMastery.com is an example of this. It’s a strong brand name in addition to being keyword-based.

URL Selection Action Guide

Action Item: Here’s the process for picking the best URL for your niche site.

1. Decide what your long-term goals are for the site
2. Choose whether it’s more important to have a keyword-based or brand-based URL for the site
3. Choose the primary keyword phrase that you would like to target
4. Brainstorm web address names that contain your keyword and find one that is available OR brainstorm brand name ideas for your site
5. Choose your URL and register it with hosting for your  site

A great tool for checking available domains quickly is Instant Domain Search.

And now I want to hear from you. How do you choose the right URL for a new site? What questions do you have about finding the best URL? Sound off in the comments below.