Would a Domain By Any Other Name Be As Sweet As It Looks?
When I first launched this site I picked a domain that closely matched the company I was working at without being so close as to infringe on trademarks and such. My goal back then was to help my employer launch a blog to complement their corporate site. Mistake #1.
Unfortunately I left the company and so the domain name didn’t make much sense so I changed it to digantsharma.com. I liked this new domain as it gave me a lot of leeway in terms of topics I could write about. Afterall, SEM (search engine marketing) is the umbrella term that covers both paid search and search engine optimization. Mistake #2.
While those in the industry know that SEM is an umbrella term, those that buy SEM services actually think it equates to paid search or PPC. It’s a lot like how social marketing has been adopted by many to refer to activities involving social media sites and content when its original meaning from the 70’s is marketing with the goal of changing some aspect of society e.g. anti-smoking campaigns. So picking SEM was mistake #3.
I also had a grand vision of partnering with one or more people to augment the content I write about SEO. Ideally, that partner would be someone on the PPC side of things. I never found such a partner and so a majority of this site’s content is SEO related. Mistake #4.
So what is the impact of all of these mistakes? Well, as an SEO I’m bummed that:
1. I don’t have a decent ranking for SEO blog (yeah I’ve already included SEO in my title tag). That phrase is certainly competitive, but I even with passive link building efforts I figure I’d at least be in the top 50.
2. I do have a #2 ranking for SEM blog. Sadly, according to Google the number of monthly searches for this phrase are 16% of those for SEO blog globally and just 2% in the US.
Pick your domain names carefully! And if there happens to be a paid search blog owner out there that picked a bad domain with SEO in it please contact me. Maybe we can arrange a domain name swap 
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