.NET VS .COM VS Keyword Density in the URL, What do you suggest?
-
I am about to launch an eCom project for a new company. The client has three URL's available.
I recognize keyword density is slowly becoming less and less of a factor, but still has significant relevance.
I haven't had much experience working on .NET URL's and would like to know anything related to the effects of .NET url's vs. .COM url's. Also, just what you would go with and why?
Option 1
(17 total characters)
Option 2
"MOSTLYMATCHINGKEYWORDcompany.com"
(21 total characters, with company)
Option 3
"ABEXACTMATCHKEYWORD.com" -AB represents the company's initials/logo.
(19 total characters)
USEFUL POINTS
1. 95% of purchases will be one time purchases (so I'm not focused as much on company branding as usual).
2. The company name is actually "exact matching keyword Company"
3. We will be targeting 100's of terms, but the "exact match keyword" represents 1/4 of total search volumes and thus is extremely important.
-
The ultimate truth here is much more important a consideration than which version you go with. IF you intend to build a highly trusted site with highly trusted off-site signals, and truly unique content that's highly focused and deep enough, either domain variation will work just fine.
If you are stuck on the belief that an exact match or exact match variations are a golden ticket, you are just as likely to see the site suffer Google's recent Exact Match Domain (EMD) devaluation regardless of the domain you choose, because no matter what, SEO best practices need to be implemented.
I will, however, agree with James in regard to the "perceived" value of a ".com" domain vs. a ".net" domain as well. There is a certain value in a ".com" from a user perspective in general, and that needs to be considered.
-
To be honest I would probably go with the option: "MOSTLYMATCHINGKEYWORDcompany.com"
In my eyes .com is still king in the domain world on a global level,
.com means commercial and for business.
I have had some decent success with .net over the years, but in the end of the day the best success I have seen is from .com domains and .com.au (my market)
Most big business go with the .com domain too, that is why they are still so expensive.
-
HI mGordon,
I would use the Company name which happens to be exact. During a recent update many sites were affected by what Google called a Exact Match Domain Devaluation, however I recall reading something from Dr.Pete (seomoz staff guru) that this was not the case, and more sites that had Part Match Domains were hit by the algo change. I know of a site that fell with a domain that had Company[Exact Keyword].
As long as your company name and your keyword are exact I don't think Google will not punish your site. Also if you focus primarily on earning relevant links with your contents you will indicate to Google that your site has trustworthy documents in its index.
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
-
Changing domain name, witch is better - brand name.com vs keyword + brand name.com?
Hi, I just made one decision and now I'm bit worried, if I did right one. I hope that you can give me feedback and advice regarding it. I'm in hookah market, so I do not have any possibilities to buy adds, so SEO is really-really important to us. I know a lot of things what has to be done to perform better, but currently I have just few really important questions. In international market the main keyword is "hookah" and everything related to that. We are small company and our brand is not that well known and do not have high volume traffic on website. Hookah in front of that we tough will give better understanding to audience about what is the page. Which domain name is better for SEO and also branding purposes? Currently we were using the first one without keyword, no we switched to the second one (just about week ago). https://hekkpipe.com https://hookahhekkpipe.com Regarding it, some really important questions: Would the longer version of domain helps us better rank with important keywords to us or not? When we will write good content, which domain is more likely shared? I'm bit afraid that first one and that we made a mistake changing the domain name. When the 1st one, then how big difference does it potentially make? Thank you
Branding | | Karel_K0 -
Rebranding/Url Structure Change
Hi Everyone, First off thanks for taking the time to looking at my question. I was wondering about rebranding and URL structure changes. Right now my company is planning on changing their domain and doing a massive change to their site which includes a url structure change. The idea is in September they will be changing the site to be a combination of wordpress and ruby on rails (currently the site is ruby on rails). The homepage and design on the site will be completely different and parts of the site will be in php and other parts will be in ruby. The URL structure will also be changing completely at the same time. Each page will be completely different in structure, including the homepage (currently now it redirects you to a subfolder page that is your local page [i.e. nyc if you are in new york]). Then, the following month, they will be changing their domain name to a different domain. I have asked them to do this in stages. First the domain, second the rebrand, and third the URL restructuring or we could lose SEO traffic but they asked a freelancer his opinion and the freelancer said that you could do the rebrand change with the URL restructure and then domain later and while you're SEO may disappear, it'll definitely return in 3 to 4 months. Could you tell me who is right and what the correct method is to make this change?
Branding | | MattJD0 -
Is it OK to choose a Domain Name with Brand-name followed by keyword? Part 2
Last month I have posted a question about choosing the right domain name for a website which is currently popular in india, which also needs to be popular in USA. Here's the link to that question (http://moz.com/community/q/is-it-ok-to-choose-a-domain-name-with-brand-name-followed-by-keyword) As you can see the question got 3 helpful responses from experts. But if you scroll down and see.. there is a 4th response which I myself posted throwing some extra doubts, (This was left unanswered.) Could someone please check that thread and clarify my doubt ( the 4 response)
Branding | | PaulineRose0 -
Is it OK to choose a Domain Name with Brand-name followed by keyword?
My client has a website (brandname.co.in) The website is popular in India (we show up 1st in SERP for our brand name as the search query in Google India) but results are different in Google US, Actually we are not even in the top 10 results in the US version of Google SERP. The Domain name (brandname**.com**) is already taken by another person and he isn't using the domain but expects around $100000 for selling the domain. So we are only left with the option of buying another domain name. My client provides business intelligence consulting services/solutions. What I would like to know is can I recommend buying (brandname-bianalytics.com)? Would this be treated as keyword stuffing? Is there a possibility that my website be penalized by EDM algorithm updates for my primary keyword(bi analytics)? Please advise.
Branding | | PaulineRose0 -
Should I remove our videos from DotSub.com to try & boost our Wistia videos?
Okay all you video SEO lovers, I had a thought today that I thought would make an interesting question. I have been using the tools at DotSub.com to transcribe our videos. The tools are great, and even better, free. We have about 80 videos on DotSub and all of these videos are also on our YouTube channel. Once I've completed the transcription, I've been exporting the .srt file and uploading them to YouTube to replace the God-awful machine transcriptions (sorry Google, but they are baaaadddd). Anyway, sometimes our DotSub video will outrank the same YouTube video, sometimes not. The 80 videos on DotSub have amassed about 10,000 views and a couple of translations...which is nice, I guess? Recently, we've begun experimenting with Wistia. Here is a search term for which our YouTube and DotSub video results pretty much flood page 1: "studiolive webinar" All of the DotSub videos also exist as Wistia videos on our Website and blog. For obvious reasons, we would rather have our Wistia videos rank in those three positions which right now are dominated by the DotSub versions. Should I remove the content from DotSub in order to try to get the Wistia videos to rank instead? Or should I leave them all there? I should probably add that we do have Wistia videos that are outranking both Dotsub and Youtube versions of the exact same videos...so I know that's possible. I'm just wondering if by leaving all of these videos up at DotSub if we are cannibalizing our potential at ranking for videos that link back to our site? What do you think?
Branding | | danatanseo0 -
Moving Blog from www.topic.domain.com to www.domain.com/blog
Hi Fellow Mozzers, Just started off here on seomoz.org and am super happy to have joined the community! I've recently started a new job as web optimization manager for an education company. There is a lot to do and one of my first tasks is to figure a better strategy for our current blog. I've convinced our management to move our blog from topic.domain.com to domain.com/blog. My research has shown that this is a better strategy so that our blog can receive the DA of our root domain, get more people to click through our site, and even receive more natural searches (PLEASE, someone correct me if I'm wrong on this). Anyway, our blog is currently hosted as a Wordpress blog and we're wondering if it's more worthwhile to build a blog platform ourselves or continue using Wordpress. I am not a technical guy and don't know the backend stuff to make it happen, but my concern is primarily for the optimum search capacity. Also, our bloggers frequently put links to different portions of our website - does this hold any negative SEO value in terms of too much internal linking? I personally wouldn't assume so, but then again I could be wrong. Finally, we also track our main website using Google Analytics- currently, the only tracking we have installed on our blogs is the default provided by Wordpress (yes yes I know, but that's why i'm here -- to fix these weaknesses). I'm assuming we will be able to better track using GA when the switch is made. So, I guess my questions are: (1) Is my research correct in that it's better to have our blog hosted as domain.com/blog over topic.domain.com (2) Are there any best practices in making this switch and/or any negative implications with continuing to use Wordpress or should we build our own platform (we have the internal resources to do so, but would prefer to take the easiest and best route in terms of SEO and community building). (3) Will it still be just as easy to track using GA. Thank you!! Pedram
Branding | | CSawatzky0 -
Press Release Suggestion
Hi Guys, I'm looking to for a good press room that would suits this website http://www.eap-csf.eu the information provided in the press releases will be mainly associated with Eastern Europe and getting important democratic information about civil society topics in the EU and it's member stats. I am thinking of using http://www.prlog.org/ does anyone have any other suggestions that may suit? Thanks in advance.
Branding | | Socialdude0 -
Land Rush for an entirely new suite of keywords ;-)
Big business associated with "pets" and other terms used for animals might fall away to terms such as "animal companion". Some people think that the term "pet" is politically incorrect. http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/us/2011/05/09/dnt.pet.politically.incorrect.CBC?hpt=T2 Time to go out and register "AnimalCompanionSupplies.com" I doubt that very many people are going to start searching for "animal companion food" but. the people who adopt these new terms will be, in my opinion, the same folks who buy high end goods and stuff a lot of items in their shopping carts. 😉 J/K
Branding | | EGOL2