domain names tips

Good questions… I will let one of our resident experts offer their take on this…

Wow I was JUST coming here to ask the professor about this same topic!!!!

Spooky

were you eavesdropping???

lol anyone have AIM, MSN, or YAHOO i could bother for a few moments?

I’m no expert, but here’s my 2 cents worth based on my own research and experience.

1. What is better- with or without dashes? (example: besthotels or best hotels)

– For SEO, dashes is better so long as the domain name contains keywords relative to your site. From a users perspective, no dashes seem to get higher click throughs (CT’). Probably because it looks more professional.

2. Does the order matter? (ex: besthotels or hotelsbest).

– Again it depends on your keyword phrases. If someone searches for best hotels, then the domain name best-hotels.com would work better than hotels-best.com. Determine which key phrases your site will be targetting and choose your domain name accordingly.

3. What is the importance of .com verses .net verses .org verses the rest?

– There doesnt seem to be a whole lot of difference between the various domain extensions from an SEO view that I can see. But, most people tend to like the almight .com if you can get a good domain name for it.

4. The shortness of the name? ex: hotels-best-hotels-best

– The longer the name, the more potential keyphrases can be targetted. However, you shouldn’t optimize for more than a few good keyphrases per page. Also, from a users point of view, a long name may not appear very professional and may get less click throughs than a shorter, more concise name. Which name would you rather click, best-online-hotel-deals.com or hoteldeals.com?

Remember, SEO is not an exact science and 10 different SEO’s may give you 10 different opinions on things. For me, what I said above seems to be true.

Anyone else with some feeback?

So then in a traffic sense going for that cool name that people can remember is not as good as say 4 good keywords with dashes?

Or would it be good to buy the cute cool memorable name and also the SEO favored name and just direct them to the same page?

Having a cool short name as well as a keyword rich name all pointing to the same site would be ideal I think.

Also, a cool short name can also work okay for SEO if you are targetting only mildly competitive keyphrases so long as page names and folders are keyword rich.

ex) http://www.coolsite.com/big-red-tractors.html would likely do pretty well for a search under “big red tractors” so long as the page was optimized well.

The best approach may be to do various searches on the Search Engines you will be optimizing for and see who is ranking well. If only keyword rich domains are getting top ranking then you may need to do likewise. If there are numerous sites with “cool names” that are still doing well then maybe you wont need the keyword rich domain. It all depends on how competitive the keywords are.

Study the competition and emulate what they are doing…

I agree with Kevin, especially when he got to the last point. Multi-hyphen names have a stigma. They look spammy, and reality usueally are, although not always obviously. And there is no need for them when talking about sub-pages because you can just name directories with specific words.

One hyphen is usually fine, but overall try to keep it simple.

I know people who believe that long hyphenated domain names create an “extra headline” effect when viewed in a PPC ad. This doesn’t relate to search engine rankings–it’s just an idea about why some folks use the long hyphenate domains.

I’m not good at getting search engine rankings myself, so I can’t speak to the effectiveness of either domain type as it relates to that.

In terms of valuation, shorter domains are almost always worth more because they are correspondingly rarer.

Originally posted by Chips For Free
So then in a traffic sense going for that cool name that people can remember is not as good as say 4 good keywords with dashes?

Or would it be good to buy the cute cool memorable name and also the SEO favored name and just direct them to the same page?

Dashed is good!

online-craps-gambling-casinos.com

I have keywords like:

online craps
craps online
craps gambling
craps casinos
gambling casinos
online casinos
online gambling
craps gambling casinos
etc………

Search engines will pick the words out of the URL, Title, Des, Keyword, main page and index it.:rasta:

Hyphens only hurt if your name has type-in value. Like onlinecasino.com Vs
online-casino.com Rarely would someone “type-in” the latter. “Type-in” meaning bypassing search engines & going straight to the browser address bar.

if I had it to do over I would have named my site ….. eh…. assuming all the good short names are basically taken, I’d go with …. cannotwin.com

or perhaps better would be cantwin.com

the reason is the same reason when you here the words “godaddy” you think of domain names.

there is little chance it will be mis-typed or mispelled, its short. and most of all, its a name you won’t forget anytime soon. Nor will you likely confuse it with anything else because its more likely that if you typed in that name and mispelled or even got the words turned around; that a 404 page would show up, not somebody else’s site.

They’ll try again and it being so simple and short, probably will get it right on second try.

the hyphen names I don’t even try to brand; unless they are a single hyphen (somebody mentioned about that) and the two words set-apart are memorable.

example is http://www.poker-sharks.com

that one I will brand. Making it a point to always say “remember the hyphen” or some crap like that.

2 cents

oops! cantwin.com already taken. Well….. you get the idea.