Posts Tagged ‘Domains’

Should I Use Dashes Or No Dashes In My Domains?

January 28th, 2009  |  by Court  |  Published in Domains  |  15 Comments

I got some interesting questions in the comments of the How To Choose A Domain Name For Your Niche Website lesson, here’s one of them:

So a yourkeyword.net is always preferred over a your-keyword.com?
Do most people feel .net is more acceptable than dashes?

The question is basically whether it’s a good idea to use dashes in domains that you buy.

I personally have some domains with dashes and I’ve seen a few drawbacks. I’m not totally against them, but to be honest, with the drawbacks that they have I can’t justify going with them when there are better options.

There are two big drawbacks that I see with dashed-domains:

  1. The resale value is lowered.
  2. The click-through rate from search engines to your site is lower. No one would be able to test this without having two sites that rank for the same keyword – fortunately I have seen this situation and can tell you that the dashes seem to affect this. It isn’t going to affect it by a huge amount but dashed domains do tend to look a little more spammy than domains that aren’t dashed and this will make a small amount of people skip over them.

The question asked more specifically if you should choose ‘yourkeyword.net’ over ‘your-keyword.com’ and this is a definite yes. With yourkeyword.net you have an exact keyword match in the domain and this will give you a ranking advantage. I don’t have any evidence personally that ‘your-keyword.com’ gives you the exact match bonus with Google, in fact my experience tells me that it seems not to.

I don’t really know (or care to be honest) what most people prefer. All I know is what my results have told me and that’s what I trust.

How To Choose A Domain Name For Your Niche Website

January 26th, 2009  |  by Court  |  Published in Domains  |  45 Comments

Before you get this far, you should have chosen a topic for your site. As you’ll see in this lesson, choosing a domain name before you choose a topic isn’t wise. You need to know what keyword traffic you’re going to go after before you can choose a domain name that will work well for you.

Learning how to choose a domain name for your website is quite simple, especially if you’re setting up a simple niche site.

People tend to get really confused when it comes to choosing a domain because of all of the conflicting strategies and advice that is out there. In order to make this as effective as possible, let’s define two totally different types of sites:

  1. Niche informational sites – This series is designed to teach you how to create these. Niche informational websites are probably the most effective types of sites for individuals to make. They are generally somewhat small but still provide solid information, albeit about a small topic.
  2. Flagship sites – These sites generally have hundreds of pages and are designed to obtain readers and repeat visitors. These are great selling tools for advanced internet marketers but can be a lot to manage.

How To Choose A Domain Name For A Niche Informational Site

Please keep in mind that this lesson is addressing only how to select domains for a niche informational site. Here is my preferred order that I always follow when choosing domains for my niche sites:

  1. The .com version of the main keyword of your niche site – placeyourkeywordhere.com. If it’s available, register it and your search is over. An example of this would be trying to register cheapcellphoneplans.com if your keyword was ‘cheap cell phone plans’.
  2. The .net version of your keyword – placeyourkeywordhere.net. Obviously you’re going to go with the .com if it’s available and if it’s not, try the .net. An example of this would be trying to register cheapcellphoneplans.net if your keyword was ‘cheap cell phone plans’.
  3. The .com version of your keyword with an additional word at the beginning or the end. For example, placeyourkeywordhereguru.com. There are plenty of words you can add to your keyword to make this work including site, shop, info, guide, guru, gurus, best, and online. Find one that works for you and register it.

The bottom line for a niche website is to get your keyword in your domain, and to use a .com or a .net.

We use Proud Domains to register our domains. They have 24/7 phone support, are very reliable, and cost less than GoDaddy and Register.com.

Update: Here’s an auxiliary lesson on this topic: Should I Use Dashes Or No Dashes In My Domains?