Registering a domain is becoming increasingly difficult, the popularity of the internet means it can be very difficult to register a domain that you would actually like because chances are, someone else already registered it. But are we considering the domains we register enough? I don’t think so.

Firstly, lets clear up what a keyword rich domain is. It is simply a domain name that contains at least some keywords from the main search term you wish to be found for.

Take for example a site I created a couple of years back www.mac3dsoftware.com. This domain happens to contain the exact keywords that I want the site to be found for.  Why is that important? Well, it seems now more than ever Google is placing more value in links back to a site, and the words that are used for those links are the key.

A few years ago, a quick search for the term ‘miserable failure’ in Google would return the official White House website in position no.1 and link directly to a page about George W Bush. It goes without saying that those in charge of the White House website weren’t trying to be placed no.1 on Google for that particular term (or maybe it was sabotage!). So why did their site top the rankings? Simply because people were linking to their site and using the words miserable failure as the link text. Like I have done here. (Sorry George, just trying to make a point!)

By creating a site with a keyword rich domain, you are effectively harnessing this power and using it in your favour, getting links back to your site can be difficult enough, getting them with the right link text is even more difficult. Maybe you should be considering a keyword rich domain!

Enquiries from Google usually generate around 50% of my workload so it’s going to be an interesting period and one that can’t pass quickly enough for me.

Whilst developing the new NoVolume site using Wordpress I checked the privacy box saying I would like to block search engines but allow normal visitors. It does seems pretty self evident what will happen if you check that box, but I did have a reason for clicking it. I assumed that Wordpress had some kind of built in search engine submission and I didn’t want Google to crawl and index my new site on it’s temporary url.

A week or so later I put my new site live and it was certainly working harder for me than my previous site (according to Google Analytics). Unfortunately, and this is the crucial part – I never changed the privacy settings to allow search engines to find my site after putting it live. This wasn’t an accident though, I assumed that because Google already knew of the existence of NoVolume, I didn’t need to tell it again. I was wrong. Wordpress had placed a noindex,nofollow meta tag onto the home page of my new site and I had no idea.

Google has now attempted to crawl my site, found this meta tag and has removed my site from it’s listing.

I have since removed the offending tag, and all I can do now is sit and wait until my site gets crawled again.

It’s going to be a long month!