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Thank you for your response. Links is a big concern of ours, the option to display both sites on an entry page is a definite non starter, the client doesn't like that idea. I like the option of using sub folders. We would link between the two sites to allow a user to book rooms in either season.

I suppose these types of projects are the ones that challenge us all to think outside the box.

Thank you again, food for thought.

Martin

We are pitching to a hotel client to build two new websites, a summer website and a winter website, two completely different looking websites.

The client wants to automatically switch their domain name to point to one or the other, depending on the time of year. The customer does not want to use a landing page where you would choose which site to visit; they want the domain name to go directly to the relevant website.

Our options:

Set up two new domain names and optimise each website based on the holiday season and facilities offered at that time of year. Then change the exisiting domain name to point at the website that is in season.

Or

Use the existing domain name and setup two sub domains, switching the home page as necessary.

We have been chewing this one over for a couple of days, the concern that we have with both options is loss of search visibility. The current website performs well in search engines, it has a home page rank of 4 and sub-pages ranking 2 and 3’s, when we point the domain at the summer site (the client only has a winter website at present) then we will lose all of the search engine benefits already gained. The new summer content will be significantly different to the winter content. We then work hard for six months optimising the summer site and switch back to the Winter site, the content will be wrong.

Maybe because it's Friday afternoon we cannot see the light for the smoke of the cars leaving the car park for the weekend, or maybe there is no right or wrong approach.

Is there another option? Are we not seeing the wood for the trees?

Your comments highly welcome.

Martin

Yes, Martin from the UK here: pretty much all of our pages are now ranked with a minimum of PR2, the main pages having PR3. On Friday, only the home page had a PR. Do you think that Plus +1 wil eventually either replace PR or influence it?

If we all listened to what might happen, we would all still be living in caves and eating berries. Sometimes we have to cross a bridge when we arrive at, yes we need to be aware that the bridge is a swing bridge, but it's all about timing, we need to arrive in plenty of time. Google is not going to kill small businesses by penalising them for telling customers what they do in their domain name. How is Google going to tell the difference between a business name and a keyword loaded domain? Our office is near Heathrow, the local taxi firm is called Airport Taxis, likewise one of the local Indian restaurants is called The Curry House, what would Google do with these businesses, penalise their websites? There would be an almighty backlash.

Yes I agree, the ultimate decision is with the business owner. As we are all aware, smaller businesses require faster responses and typically have lower budgets, which are a key factor. Probably the most difficult factor is time, as we know, receiving content from small businesses when building a website is a challenge, getting them to update a blog, some social networking sites and even Twitter is all but impossible. They have good intensions but they do not have the staff or sufficient time to make it a success.

If Google wants to assist small businesses to compete online, they have to be sensitive to their environment.

Okay, this is an interesting one. last year we had read many posts about keywords in the domain name, the industry seemed to be split more or less 50-50 if this was beneficial or not, so we decided to do an experiment on our own domain name. We will publish an article regarding this and post it more detail on SEOMoz later this month, but for now, our results are definitely in favour of keyword loaded domains.

Originally we used eCommerce-web-design-seo.com as our domain name, it said exaclty what we did. Just over six months ago, we changed this to our business name fusionsoft.co.uk, as well as doing this, we put a reasonable effort into seo to make sure that the test was fare. Over the last six months we have seen a huge drop in traffic, we are now going to change back to the keyword loaded domain.

Now, just to back this up a little further, we have a customer who runs a part time business, we built them a low budget website, the domain was their business name, Drysdale Couture, they had no money for marketing, we did all the basic onsite optimisation and set them up with a few local (quality directory inserts), they had no enquiries for 6 months. We suggested changing their domain name to a keyword loaded domain name, bespoke-bridesmaid-dresses.co.uk now they have a top 10 listing for variations of these keywords.

However, the counter argument is also a strong one, it is better to build a brand that customers will search for and find you directly, dependant on the nature of the business, building a strong brand can be expensive and take a long time.

Using a keyword loaded domain alongside good SEO Marketing will deliver results, however, the domain name should not be too heavily loaded and must be based on good search research, e.g. bespoke bridesmaid dresses.

I hope this helps.