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I agree, the second is not as clean. But what is better for google? Keyword: Ice Surfing Nevada
Yoast says #2 is better because the exact match for the keyword is in the title.
#1 looks cleaner, but we're relying on the domain name to complete the keyword. Most of the keyword (Ice Surfing) has been left out of the page title and slug.
Thanks!!
Extremely thorough and insightful response. I hadn't thought of some of these other avenues. If nothing else, this gives us new things to try, and new reason to be hopeful.
THANK YOU!
Here is another tough one we've been dealing with. We publish a niche book. For a decade we kept the information offline (no e-books). However, it was widely scanned and reproduced online. We've filed dozens of DMCA complaints over the years, but have found trying to rid the internet entirely of these infringing pages to be futile. We get 1 closed and find 3 more.
Two years ago we decided to put the information online ourselves, to generate an official community for our work it instead of "fighting it". We built a full site with hundreds of pages from the book for readers to use, free. Google indexed us, and we followed basic SEO... But in spite of a prime aged domain and a lot of links, we are literally BURIED in google. There are dozens of complete garbage spam sites that rank way higher than us.
I understand ranking takes time, and the niche is competitive. But the low quality landing pages that are ranking above us is just too confusing. We fear our work has been indexed by google so much over the years on other sites they will never connect it to us. We'll always be buried on page 14 as another scrape.
What would you do to correct this for a client? Could you?
We're working on a new buildout, and this one is really important to us. We've put a lot of resources into it. Before we launch, we want the structure to be just right... and this one question is nagging at me. How to structure urls? Consider these two options.
The fictitious domain is "icesurfing.org". Including all 50 states in the keyword, there are nearly one million searches per month for "ice surfing [state]". We have a page for each state to focus on this traffic. But how would you structure the urls and titles?
One concern is that the duplicate keywords in option 2 seem redundant, and a little spammy. When presented with google search, the matching tags are not as clean.
But Yoast automatically suggests option 2. Is this really the best practice? Is there are definitive article on this?
THANK YOU!
Thank you Ryan. Very helpful. We are aware there is a lot of work to do. I write and have some recognition in my field, and am prepared to roll up my sleeves for this. Being that we're at ground zero, we just want to start off with the best advantage.
Thanks to you both for the help!
No, this isn't the industry what we're looking at. Just an example.
We are the only company with an EMD for the target keywords in our industry. Our .org happens to be fairly brandable for our industry; it should not come across as spammy. It is far more "feedthehungry.org" than "buybabypowder.org". I'm just trying to find out if it hurts to go with this (specifically from a google perspective) or helps to go with this, and if so, if it is better to use a space in our brand name instead of calling ourselves exactly keywords.org. I hope I'm making sense.
A good example may be www.FeedTheHungry.org. It comes up first for the search "Feed the hungry".
I'd imagine their #1 placement for this search term is due in part to the EMD for "feed the hungry" search. Maybe I'm wrong. If there is an advantage though, would there be any extra advantage to calling themselves the "Feed the hungry organization" vs "feedthehungry.org". This is the crux of my question.
Sorry if I'm dense and not quite getting it.
Thank you! So if I read this all correctly, google will look for the links back to BlueWidgets.org on one hand. On another, google will also be searching the web to see if our corporate (brand) name comes up often. It is not like it is searching the text near (not in) our backlinks to see if our keywords are close too. Rather, google seems to judge the links and our brand mentions somewhat independently.
In that case, "BlueWidgets.org" might be good for our brand name if people easily and widely refer to us as "BlueWidgets.org". It doesn't really matter for our ranking if we have that space in the name or not, only that people use our brand name.
Put more simply, we don't get any extra SEO push if we make the keywords ALSO part of our brand name. The EMD is enough. Does that sound about right?
Thank you for the help. The article was good also. As you can see, I'm a beginner.
Yes, I've read this quite a bit. Still, we surely assumed there would be value in starting a business on "BabyPowder.com" vs "AnyNewBrandNamewithnoKeywords.com", if we're trying to get our traffic from searches for "Baby Powder" specifically, no? Has the EMD value eroded so much that these premium domain names are worthless to build on?
I'm still a bit confused, sorry. I'm new to this all. Let me ask like this. Is there any SEO advantage for search term "blue widgets" with people referring to us with the spaces in our name, in their own posts and backlinks to us? I want to know if google will give us better ranking if third party articles and forum posts reference like this:
"This article came from the guys at Blue Widgets Foundation. http://www.bluewidgets.org/conent"
Instead of referencing us like this:
"This article came from the guys at BlueWidgets.org. http://www.bluewidgets.org/conent"
Thank you Ryan. We're not overly concerned with the branding aspect right now. Actually, in our field "BlueWidgets.org" has a sound of authority. We kind of like the name.
If we chose it, people would widely be referring to us as "BlueWidgets.org" instead of the "Blue Widgets Organization" though. I need to know if our links are already pointing to www.bluewidgets.org/content, is there still an added advantage to people referring to us as "Blue Widget Foundation" with the spaces? Does it matter from an SEO perspective specific to these two keywords. The real traffic for us (if we're successful) will come only when people search for "Blue Widgets" in google.
Thank you!
Sorry if this is a basic question I should know the answer for. We have just acquired the .org for a moderately well searched keyword set. Our objective is to fight for rank specifically on this one set of two keywords. We want make sure our site is setup and business named optimally for this. Here is my question. What is the best business name for SEO and keyword rich backlinks, or anything else I'm not thinking of?
KEYWORDS: Blue Widget DOMAIN: BlueWidget.org
BUSINESS NAME OPTIONS:
A) simply BlueWidget.org. We like this but do we lose some benefit of "Blue Widget" with a space on backlinks?
**B) Blue Widget Foundation. Is this better because people will reference us by the keywords with a space "The Blue Widget Foundation", instead of "from the people at BLUEWIDGET.org"? **
Am I missing anything important here in the name? We just want to start everything off on the right foot.
Thank you Moz. Just joined and my first post.