If you have gone shopping for a domain name recently, you know how hard it is to find a good keyword rich domain name that isn't already taken without having to pay a premium price for it. I ran into this very dilemma when purchasing the domain for my furniture site through godaddy.com. The site specializes in Adirondack style patio furniture, and as you can probably guess, with 1.2 million web sites showing up in Google search for Adirondack chairs, any domain with the word "Adirondack" in it was long since gone. Best I could do was www.cedarchairstore.com.
In spite of the lack of the word Adirondack in the domain name, I have been able to achieve page 1 and 2 results on Google, Yahoo and MSN for keywords such as "cedar Adirondack chairs" with this site simply by employing a few wise SEO strategies, which by the way have not included tons of back links or ezine articles. I am sure if I had taken those extra steps, a top 3 position would already be mine with ease. The consistent position 1 and 2 holder is actually a student of Derek Gehl, and has done a very good job putting her site together, and has submitted a whole slue of articles to ezinearticles.com. (Tip: Know your top competition, visit their sites, disect them, follow their success if you can)
Mainly, I implemented keyword optimization, META tags, image anchor text and about 6 months worth of waiting on Google.
Then like a flash of lightning, the solution to my problem struck my brain... subdomains can be created using any keywords you want. If www.cedarchairstore.com doesn't place as highly on Google as I want, then http://adirondackchair.cedarchairstore.com/ should fix the problem. Granted, it is a little long for anybody to type in, but I am looking for search engine ranking and clicks, not for somebody to type the URL in anyway.
About 15 minutes in FrontPage, and I had a page ready to upload to my new subdomain, a couple of articles on Qassai, and bingo, the page is showing up in Google within 2 hours. As I had hoped, this new page is already outranking the main site for several of my target keywords. Traffic is up, sales are up, no complaints. Guess I better start writing some articles now.
Try this out. I guarantee, if you do your due diligence with your SEO efforts, it will work for you too