Using YouTube Videos to Pick the Right Domain Name

By Duncan Heath

I recently had an idea about using popular YouTube videos to help inform your domain name choices, and thought I would share it here.

Many people set up blogs not to sell anything in particular, but instead to build powerful sites over time that they can sell advertising on, sell guest posts from or dare I say it…sell links from. When setting up these sorts of sites, not a lot of attention is given to domain names. Most people go for something that sounds “cool” or is otherwise a generic phase such as “everythingandalways.com”. However if you thought carefully about domain choice, you could kick off your site’s traffic and link building efforts with much greater ease.

Popular YouTube

The first thing to do is search on YouTube for very popular (or better yet famous) videos. You can do this by sorting all the videos by “most viewed” and setting the time scale to “all time”. Here are some examples: evolution of dance, tootin bathtub baby cousins, the gummy bear song.

Next, you should check out the competition for the terms in the SERPS and also the suggested search volumes in Google Adwords Tool (yes we all know it’s flawed but it’s a good indicator). You’ll notice that the official site for Judson Laipply appears top of the SERPS (under the video results) when you search for “Evolution of Dance”. It’s also worth noting that this site is a PR5 site and has backlinks from Wikipedia, PCWorld and Wired.com.

Popular Terms

With this in mind it might not be worth going after the “evolution of dance” term, but it does show just how popular a site like this can become. If you hunt around the terms related to the other videos above however, you’ll notice there is very little competition in the SERPS, and certainly no optimised URLs. Just doing a quick check, I can see that domains such as tootinbathtubbabies.com and gummy-bear-song.com are available to buy (at time of writing).

These domains represent brilliant opportunities as there will not only be a great deal of search surrounding the terms, but very little competition standing in your way. With a little onsite optimisation and some targeted link building you should be able to move to the top of the SERPS without too much trouble and may even be considered a brand after a while due to a specific domain name, specific link building using domain name terms, and high search volume surrounding “your brand term”.

Careful Choice

I wouldn’t use this technique to determine the name for my new clothing retail site, but for a general blog I would much prefer to have a domain name that already had half a million searchers per month relating to it, than something like everythingandalways.com, which I would suggest gets none.

Author Information

Duncan is an SEO and marketing professional promoting a villas in France enterprise. He’s always looking for new ways to get the most out of the SERPS.

8 Reasons Why I Tossed Your Press Release

I threw out your news release today, mere moments after it landed on my desk. That’s too bad, because some tree had to give up its life or precious bandwidth was wasted as both hard and electronic copies of your “news” made its way around the globe.

Newsworthy? Not hardly.

Luckily, no lasting harm was realized—I shook off what you wrote and soon moved on to some real news, managing to use certain well written information as a jumping-off point for a new article.

Yet, the taste of your “bad form” release has to be addressed, so please allow me to share the eight things I found in your piece that is at the center of our collective angst:

1. Terrible Title – 80 characters maximum is a nice rule of thumb for a good title, but you nearly doubled that limit. I couldn’t tell if you were making an announcement or crying out for help.

2. Weak Intro – You lost me after the first paragraph, let alone the first sentence. Neither had anything to do with the title which meant I had to work to figure out what your news angle was.  That angle was nowhere to be found so you failed.

3. Punishing Paragraphs – Your second and third paragraphs were much too long and could easily have been split up into several smaller paragraphs. Better yet, several sentences could have been struck out in entirety.

4. Excessive Quotes – You quoted the president of the company, vice-president of sales and the regional director, with each person saying basically the same thing. I almost expected your bookkeeper to chime in with her comments too.

5. Jarring Jargon – I realize that you are excited about your new product, but that enthusiasm needs to be tempered by reality and sensibility. I hardly know what to make of “concept of functionalities” or “holistic, groupwide simulation.” Get real and lose the Orwellian prose.

6. Pull Quotes – Your one opportunity to tell us something useful died in your pull quote. I’m glad your family rescues abandoned animals, but that tidbit has nothing to do with the news at hand. Someone goofed.

7. Stuffed Keywords – I hardly think that “redundant cycle” is a keyword phrase worth chasing after in the SERPs. Apparently, you do as I found the term scattered in five places throughout your piece. Yes, I am still annoyed!

8. Banished Boilerplate – So, you think that the press release boilerplate should be played around with, do you? Trust me, no one is interested in learning about every single unrelated product your company offers. Stick with the top performers and please keep it consistent from release to release.

Some 950 words later, I managed to sift through your release and determined that no “newsworthy” component could be found. That in itself is sufficient reason why you could have saved yourself and everyone else a whole lot of trouble.

See Also — Are Press Releases Still As Important As Ever?