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?