Your first question when opening this article will be, “so what’s with the title?” The truth is I don’t really know, I just thought it sounded cool. And I shall do as far as it’s concerned. However the purpose of this article is to point out how important domains can be in search engine optimisation.

Case study
Running a great many random websites, some of them are inevitability sex orientated – bikini sites. I actually have 3, although one has not been around for very long and cannot really provide meaningful results. The other 2 however are useful in proving how domains can get you search engine visitors.

The two websites in question are www.clickbikinis.com and www.bikinisdotcom.com. Don’t worry this isn’t an article about adult material (well, unless you want it be ;). The first gets some search engine traffic (not loads buts its ok), the second one gets very little. And I simply could not work out why.

In the terms
The first clue into my investigation was the fact that many visitors were searching for bikinis.com. This is a phrase which has been on both sites at one time or another so it shouldn’t really differ between different sites.

However it finally struck me where the extra visitors to Click Bikinis were finding the site – it was in the domain. Search engines, Google in particular were placing Click Bikinis above Bikinis Dot Com, because bikinis.com was contained in the URL of Click Bikinis.

Application
With this in mind you can alter your domain habits to try and cover this. If for instance people search for something like sex.com (sorry, I am hard pushed to find none adult examples ;), and then end your domain in sex.com, i.e., somewordsheresex.com, and you are covered in the URL.

How about if someone is looking for frog information? They might search for “frog info.” So a domain such as frog.info would be better than frog.com for targeting that search term.