Domain Name Strategy - Semi Urgent

[bangkokburning]

I have noticed two popular sites similar to the site I am looking to create use hypen and underscores. Up to them. Would I gain buy buying the connected words (url) and doing a tedirect to my site OR will these sites draw off my ranking and any other issue you may see. Thanks.

So let's say my site is bangkokmalls.com

And already exist and popular:

bangkok_shopping_experience.com

thailand-luxury-malls.com

So, remove the - and _ ?

Clever or not so much?

Edited June 4, 2013 by bangkokburning

[bangkokburning]

Another question...

I've thought of a pretty cool name (play on words) to create a brand for the website. It isva general keyword, and should be a core keyword but people seem to search other terms. Should I go with it or go back to exact domain match keywords?

Ex

Thaiflier

Bigmangotravel

(Not saying these are clever)

Or such as

Thaitickets

Thaitripsandtours

Thailandpackageholidays

Like that

[buddy]

Hi,

Probably your best bet would be to let the experts search out relevant keywords for your website at www.seoclerks.com

It is not expensive either.

[manarak]

OP:

1- in my experience, you won't get much additional traffic by buying keyword domain names that are long and contain several keywords.

Type-ins work for single keywords, and a domain containing keywords will work for your main domain.

choose something simple and easy to remember, containing one or two keywords that directly relate to the core topic of your website.

thaitickets.com or thaiflier.com are good

bigmangotravel is doubtful if it will bring any search engine benefit

and

Thaitripsandtours

Thailandpackageholidays

are dreadful for returning traffic, they won't remember the domain name.

2- properly made redirects will not negatively affect your rankings, but buying keyword domains won't improve the main site's ranking either.

3- play on words

there is an advantage to having a strong keyword in the domain name, but it's not that big. I can't tell you if the play on words is better than the keyword, that's for you to see, but the keyword option is a safe one.

4- AFAIK, domains cannot contain underscores

Edited June 4, 2013 by manarak

[bangkokburning]

Hi Manarak—

Those are simply examples.

What I had tried to show in the first example was simply a clever name, that was niethier business nor product. OK, not so good of you ate selling - but what if it is a travel blog or information blog? Then a catchy name (branding the blog) might be a good thing?

Removing hypens and spaces...I just want to buy the two url's (names) for 400b each. Both contain keywords. One three and one two. So they would click - redirect

Not interested in.paying "professionals", my two sites are hobby sites until they are something other than. I want to sell travel apps linked back to Play store, but focus now is the two websites.

Thanks

[AyG]

Domain name is a very minor factor in search engine ranking. It's vastly outweighed by the number of links pointing to your site and the ranking of those sites themselves. If you follow your click and redirect approach, you will find that the links will be split across the two domains. (I.e. some links will point to the "gateway" site, and others will point to the main site.) This will almost certainly result in both sites having a lower ranking than if you had but a single site.

The only legitimate case for a gateway site which redirects that I can think of is where the URL contains a word or words which are commonly misspelled. However, the gateway page should make it absolutely clear that it is not the site so that people don't link to it.

The purpose of the hyphen in domain names is to make sure that the search engine can split out the separate key words. However, search engines are much better at parsing domain names than they were in the past, so this has become less important. There are some domains, though, where the owners really should have put in a hyphen such as www.penisland.net, www.whorepresents.com and www.kidsexchange.net (all genuine sites).

Edited June 5, 2013 by AyG

[manarak]

What I had tried to show in the first example was simply a clever name, that was niethier business nor product. OK, not so good of you ate selling - but what if it is a travel blog or information blog? Then a catchy name (branding the blog) might be a good thing?

Branding is only a good thing if your site leaves a durable memory in the visitor's brain.

For that you either need:

#1 expensive marketing or

#2 a damn good site with uniques features

From what I understood, #1 is out of the question for you and #2 is impossible to achieve without a programmer, so it is again cost intensive (no, wordpress modules will not provide you with damn good unique features).

So I'd rather go with a simple, easy to remember keyword related domain if I were you.