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.

Facebook, StumbleUpon Rock Your World!

I am glad that I didn’t follow through on my decision last year to close my StumbleUpon account. I was getting tired of SU, finding myself particularly annoyed with certain network changes that seemed to limit my ability to connect with people through this popular bookmarking service.

In addition, SU appeared to be going the way of Reddit—gamed and controlled by nasty people whose idea of free speech is to hurl invectives at other users. Cowards!

But I stayed on and have no regrets with my decision. I certainly don’t use SU as frequently as I once did, but I have also found that most of the cowardly users have now been contained. Life is good and, if a March 2010 StatCounter GlobalStats survey of top social media sites is accurate, then sticking with SU was a good decision on my part.

Yes, SU rocks your world if you use it: only Facebook outperforms it in sending traffic your way.

According to Stat Counter, Facebook is credited with racking up 48 percent of all social media hits, but SU is a strong second as it adds 25 percent to that mix. And Twitter? Not as important as some might think, generating just 10 percent of all hits. YouTube, Reddit, Digg and MySpace round out the next four spots, offering small amounts of traffic in comparison.

SU has never been a dud when it comes to social media—far from it. As recently as June 2009, SU was ahead of Facebook, but the world’s most popular social networking site soon soared while SU began to slip. Recent traffic reports reveal that Facebook has lost some of its steam while SU has recaptured what it had lost, but in all likelihood it will remain Facebook first, StumbleUpon second, with everyone else a distant third or beyond.

One of my chief reasons for staying with SU is that I was connected with so many people through this service. As I contemplated dropping SU, I realized that I would be saying good-bye to a significant number of people I followed and who followed me.

There really wasn’t a reasonable alternative: I don’t use Facebook all that much and Twitter just doesn’t offer the scale of the others. Besides, my traffic stats continued to rise thanks to SU interaction, bringing visitors and new customers my way.

Every social media/networking site has its benefits and faults but Facebook, with more than 400 million users and StumbleUpon, with its nifty bookmarking arrangement, capture more than two-thirds of all social media hits.

Looks like I’ll have to rethink my Facebook strategy next!