Domain name advice please
-
Hi i am trying to work out what is the best when it comes to domain names. What i mean is, should you go short or should you try and fit in what you need.
So as follows.
say i need a domain name that i wanted to buy which i have done research and found that these two words together are good keywords. please note that this is an example
the two keywords are manchester airport
and the next two keywords are cheap flights
should i get a domain name that say manchesterairportcheapflights or should i have a shorter domain name like manchester cheap flights
or another example
say i wanted a domain name that fitted the following two keywords in
manchester hotels
budget accomodation
should i just get a domain name that says manchester hotels or should it get the following manchesterhotelsbudgetaccomodation
I am looking at buying a number of domain names and i am trying to find out if shorter is better or if a longer domain name is better
-
I agree with Ryan, even if the domain name will be the "perfect" SEO it does'nt mean it will have a high CTR. If you take a look at this from a users perspective:
1. You dont see the words directly, just a bunch of letters
2. People will not remember the domain name
3. It looks spammy.If you use only two words, which looks better, I think you would have some good results.
-
Thanks for that, that is great advice.
-
I would never advise using more then 2 terms in a URL for a primary domain. When you think of the most successful domains, they are all one or two terms. The exceptions are when an acronym is used representing the full terms such as with att.com.
The idea behind purchasing keyword domains exists because people are always looking to take the easy way out, and they are attracted to shiny objects (i.e. rankings). Quality SEO is about building one strong site and supporting it with great content and solid SEO.
In order to be successful with the domain names you mentioned, you will need the support of both onpage and offpage SEO, along with "SEO hosting". If you spent the same time and effort on the main site instead of with this form of tactic, the site would be far better off.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Big drop in Domain authority : Languages school in Brazil
Hi, I notice today strange update on the DA of our website and competitors website as well. caminhoslanguages.com (our website) : drop from 26 to 19 bridgebrazil.com : drop from 29 to 26 rioandlearn.com : drop from 19 to 14 carioca-languages.com : drop from 22 to 15 DA drop affect all website, but bridgebrazil.com less than the other. bridgebrazil is close now. the website is rank first, but it is a business that no longer exist. thay rank first, only because it belong to an international company that have other languages schools in different countries, providing them a huge based of links high DA. Sorry to tell you, with this new update you totally miss the point. In which sense does the DA represent the quality of the websites ?? Is it not fair for small school, trying hard to get excelent website to get penalized like this, because it is really hard for them to get link from very high PA pages you know ? Could somebody give explication? If you would like to improve your algorithms, I would suggest to reduce the values of the links from companies internal linking. Because it provide unfair advantage for small business.
Competitive Research | | Bartbijen0 -
Domain Name Keyword Change
Hello. I have a question. I currently have a client who is exploring the option of changing his domain name to one which includes a key word and his company name. Currently he is using a domain name which does not include a keyword and does not include his company name. I understand that with proper redirects we can keep a significant amount of the juice behind it and we aren't so concerned about the domain name change. However my clients only concern is this. His company and new domain have the words Best Buy in it. He is concerned about the words best buy being in the domain name as it would be directly competing with the electronics giants. Should this even be a concern? He isn't in the electronics business and the remaining of the domain would include a keyword which directly relates to his business. Any input would be appreciated.
Competitive Research | | Imagination0 -
Historical domain analysis & competitive link analysis
Hi. I have a problem with the analysis of my campaign and specialy with the historical domain and the competitive link. I don't see any upgrade since july. Thank you for your help. A.Reille
Competitive Research | | Alex750 -
What's the value of Exact Match Keyword Domains vs. Company Name Domains?
Hey Mozers, I was in a discussion this morning about the value of Exact Match Keyword domains vs. a company name domain and wanted to get a little more clarification. Let's say we are doing a site for a company called Favored Dental, and they have had the domain favoredental.com for quite a while and have their authority built up in it. Is it better to have favored-dental.com or favoreddental.co or keep its current form? The reasoning behind the alternate domains would be they have the exact match keyterm, in this case lets say "Favored Dental" is the keyterm we were going after. To my knowledge EMDs aren't as relevant as they'd use to be as Google would rather branding of companies instead of keyterm domains? Is this correct, or do EMDs of keywords you're going after hold higher authority? Thanks for the clarification!
Competitive Research | | MonsterWeb280 -
Use - or not for domain names
Hi there what is the best type of domain name if i have a keyword im targetting. Lets use 'very cool' as an example: www.verycool.com www.verycool.co.uk www.very-cool.com www.very-cool.co.uk I am led to believe the .co.uk would be better in a UK index. I also got told - count as a space, therefore the best one above for Google UK is www.very-cool.co.uk ?
Competitive Research | | pauledwards0 -
Track Back Problems, please help!
Hi there The majority of website errors are trackback, similar to this? http://www.footballfriendsonline.com/transfer-gossip/trackback/11592555 I use the platform squarespace.com and not quiet sure how to resolve this error? Any help would be much appreciated for this seo ameuter! thanks
Competitive Research | | footballfriends0 -
How does TTH have only 220 Domain Backlinks?
Was looking at these guys today http://www.tentonhammer.com/ One of the orginal games websites, an authority in its niche and 7 years old (about as long as that niche has existed) Its all unique, high quality content but it has a only 220 linking domains, including BBC etc It doesnt make any sense to me that this website should have so few linking domains. Anyone have a thought as to whats going on here? S
Competitive Research | | firstconversion0 -
SEO Strategy Questions on an International Domain
I'm going to try not to get too wordy with my question. Any help that could be provided would be much appreciated! We recently purchased a Germany-based company. They were using two domains (possibly more) for their website. Domain1 and Domain2. I'm sure for duplicate content reasons, only Domain1 ranked well. We in the US wanted to use Domain2, as it contains the brand name and would add legitimacy to our website in the US. Problem is that they also wanted to use it in Germany. So we split it using GeoDNS. Any international traffic goes to their server. Any US/Canada traffic goes to ours. From what I've read, we in the US should have the advantage here in terms of getting our pages indexed on Google, because Google will crawl from the US. So to Google, it should be as if we've changed all of our URLs. The problem is that Google has not recognized these changes for our homepage and it has been about a month since I submitted a sitemap and changed our geo-targeting to the US in Webmaster tools. They've picked up other pages of ours, but the Title and Meta descriptions for the homepage are in German still. We also rank about 23rd for our own brand name. Bing and Yahoo have picked up the changes without issue and we rank 2nd for our brand name. My other issue is that the old distributor in the US (whom we have replaced) is ranking first for our brand name. I'm working on increasing our inbound links, but is there anything else I could be doing to jump ahead of them in the rankings? Any tips would be appreciated. Thanks!
Competitive Research | | KathleenLTG0