fraggle123

What are your thoughts on hyphenated 2/3 word domain names?

I have been researching a lot of relevant keyword domains in Google Keyword Tool to find their local exacts.

However, how does this relate to 2/3 word hyphenated domains?

For example: If there are 20,000 local exacts for sit on lawnmower and you buy 'sit-on-lawnmower.net', is this a good spot to develop a mini site? Will that be a lot harder to get ranked on Google than 'www.sitonlawnmower.com'.

Or another one: what if wrapping paper had 80,000 local exacts, and you could get 'wrapping-paper.org' would this be a good spot to develop?

Thanks!

__________________
Rakeback Deals | Glasgow Hotels | Edinburgh Hotels

fraggle123

bump: would really like your guys input on this...

deliajen

i don't mind hyphen in a domain and google doesn't think negative of these,but people will often forget the hyphen and remember the non hyphen version so you lose traffic that way but using net/org/info or any other extension makes it even harder to rank so resale value will be non existent.

i have seen some nice hyphenated sales and many high street brands prefer hyphen in there domains but generally they are a fraction in value of a non hyphen.


keep to co.uk in the uk market place or country specific domains.

regards

mark

__________________
PizzaVouchers | Pendant| Loughborough

crabfoot

I'm going to talk about word1word2 domains, and I'm telling you the considered opinion of other people - this is knowledge I have "picked up" over the last 12 months. I'm putting this into practice, but I'm not seeing serious money - yet.

Most people are agreed that it is better to have the unhyphenated word1word2 domain with any given extension, because that gets better type-in traffic.
The word1-word2 version should work just as well for SEO purposes, so you compete on "level ground" with the unhyphenated version. In some rare cases the hyphenated version will remove ambiguity, and perform better (eg. car-nation will do better than carnation if you want to sell cars).

You have to consider your competition.

A lot of good names are registered and parked, with "for sale" notices. You look at those sites and decide. If the word1word2 .com is parked, you can go with word1-word2 .com and get good results.

So you look at what is parked with your word1word2 combination. You want to pick the highest-ranking extension available, and you are looking for a situation where everything ranked above that is parked or obviously underdeveloped.

Extensions rank, from the top, when aiming at the UK market,
com
co.uk
org.uk
net
org

but if you are aiming at the US market the order changes to
com
net
co.uk
org
org.uk

Your objective is to get the highest rank extension available, and a word1-word2 .com is likely to attract more search engine visits than a word1word2 .co.uk .

On the other hand, a word1word2 .co.uk, if it is properly oriented to the market, will possibly get more conversions than the word1-word2 .com.

Sometimes a word combination can be seen to be valuable, but no-one is attacking it because the subject is difficult to write about. That is why I recently registered a word1word2-4u.info domain - I know I can write the copy, everything else is registered and parked, so I'm going to try the cheap domain and put the relevant copy on a higher rank domain if it turns out to be a "worker".

That is probably as much help as you will get around here ...

__________________
Cloud Factories ppi-info

fraggle123

Some good input there guys thanks!

I am currently developing on some good 'word1-word2' domains, so my interests lie in SEO of my sites rather than the actual domain worth.

I think when considering the worth of a domain it is also important to consider 'org.uk' rather than '.net' if aimed at the UK market.

From what I have learned so far, I think it is much more profitable for me to continue building, developing and working on my SEO as its is very difficult nowadays to stumble across a valuable domain for flipping. There are a few premium domains I am interested in but what I hope to do is just find contact details on WHOIS and negotiate directly with the owner.

Thanks again for the input!

__________________
Rakeback Deals | Glasgow Hotels | Edinburgh Hotels

bensd

Why would you choose .com over .co.uk when targeting the UK market?

crabfoot

Because it brings in collateral traffic from any direction, it picks up English speakers - and there's plenty of money in Scandinavian and Benelux traffic, as well as US traffic. Don't forget, Adsense works on the viewer's location, not the site location ...

__________________
Cloud Factories ppi-info

bensd

Targeting worldwide english speakers is different than aiming for the UK market, completely different things...

If you are targeting a UK market with a UK site/product/service then US/worldwide is pointless.

crabfoot

If you want to say "I disagree, but I'm not going to tell you why because that's how I make money" I can go along with that.

Comments like these are just smug rhetoric -

If you make statements like that with no further explanation, then the statements are themselves pointless. They provide no information, and no direction for further thought. Slightly less constructive than the Dresden bombings ...

If I put up a site that is UK targeted, and someone clicks on it in a Google search, then finds he cannot use the info easily, is he going to return to the search, or click on an ad that looks immediately relevant? Do I mind if he gives me money? Is that pointless?

__________________
Cloud Factories ppi-info

fresh79

To get back on to the subject, which is best for me in this situation...
keyword1keyword2 is registered as .com+co.uk but available as .net

Now keyword1-keyword2 is available in all TLds
my target market is @ UK for affiliate marketing stuff, the current .co.uk owner is at the same game, however they have poor amount of backlinks + SEO so I am sure I can out-doo the site on that front.

Which is best for me?
keyword1-keyword2/co.uk or keyword1keyword2/net

__________________
Help me raise £6m for Cystic Fibrosis