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.

StumbleUpon Reaches 10 Million Members; Celebrates

Well, they did it. StumbleUpon, the Internet community established to help members discover and rate web pages, photos and videos has reached an important milestone. Just weeks ago SU hit the ten million user mark, quite a feat for this unusual, if not quirky, social networking platform.

SU Toolbar

When a stumble button is installed on the toolbar, users can surf the Internet and read everyone else’s finds and include some of their own. Do it enough times and you’ll become a stumble pro in no time, something I have written about extensively on this blog.

I’ve contributed tens of thousands of stumbles since I first joined in January 2007 and am quite familiar with this service. It hasn’t always been a bed of roses with SU, but what in life is perfect? For a brief period eBay owned the service, but now it is back in the rightful hands of two of its original owners and investors.

Let’s Celebrate!

SU is not letting this milestone pass without offering up a celebration. On June 17 at 8 p.m. in San Francisco, SU is inviting enthusiasts to the 111 Minna Gallery to mark the occasion. The SU team will be on hand, cocktails will be served and five iPads will be raffled. A DJ will be present, Sirron Norris will do live painting and you’re encouraged to take photographs.  You’ll also be able to take some SU schwag with you.

To reserve a place at this grand event, you’ll need to visit SU’s Facebook page to RSVP. Yes, even SU uses Facebook, but do they Twitter?!

Unfortunately, I won’t be in San Francisco to take in all of the festivities. More than likely I’ll be doing what I always do here on the east coast: stumbling and thumbing up your finds and leaving comments where appropriate.

Many More!

Congratulations to the SU Team and users: you’ve helped make SU what it is. I wonder how long it will take them to hit 20 million registered members? I say within the next two years!