DiggleNamer

According to Keyword Discovery the phrase "list of sex positions" has been searched 35,184 over the last 12 months.

Question 1: How many times would want a word or phrase to be searched before registering it for the purpose of developing into a mini-site (I guess this is tough to answer as CTR and PPC which will vary depending on the word, but some range would be interesting to hear).

Question 2: How beneficial is it to SEO if the domain name matches the search exactly i.e. listofsexpositions.com?

Question 3: If listofsexpositions.com is taken, but listofsexpositions.net is available then is it worth getting this or other gTLDs in order to get the SEO boost?

As a nube i searched other threads for this type of data, if there are some good ones I have missed please just point me.

nielsencl

Answer #1: As many as possible. But if you are developing a site the domain becomes less of a factor with searches. That is, you can take a domain that no one searches for and optimize and promote it to get great traffic. It's going to help, but unless you get a premium domain, the searches for the domain keyword will not be as important a factor, in my opinion.

Answer #2: The SEO benefit of the keywords in a domain is significant, but again it's less important when you have a site as opposed to domain parking where you need every advantage you can get.

Now, you are right in thinking that a search for "list of sex positions" will have the potential to match "listofsexpositions" and you can see some examples of this when you search for things that are not too competitive. But from what I have seen you will not have any chance of being seen for something like "sex positions" from the domain alone. Google will take out the spaces to do a secondary match, but will not try to figure out all the possible words in a domain like "listofsexpositions". To get that advantage, you would need to get a domain that was hyphen-infested, like "list-of-sex-positions". This type of domain is not popular and does not make a good choice for a web site, but works very well for domain parking, since the hyphens are treated like spaces, and it could be found for things like "sex positions". (I'd like to see what the traffic number are for this thread... :-))

Answer #3: If the .com is not available, getting one of the other TLDs should work as well as far as the benefit of the keywords in the domain. I have not seen any bias against other TLDs, and in fact I have a number of domains that most people here think are junk. And they may not be very good when it comes time to sell them, but for parking I find they work just as well as any others. So far this year my second-best income domain is a .in domain that I hand registered on 2/15/08!

I'm going to PM you with a couple of ideas for .coms that are not taken...

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DiggleNamer

Thanks for the detailed response.

So in this example "list-of-sex-positions.com" would have the most SEO potential, but is not considered a catchy name for a developed web site?

Second learning is that in developing a site that deals with such a topic, the domain is less important than the content and other SEO strategies.

"If the .com is not available, getting one of the other TLDs should work as well as far as the benefit of the keywords in the domain." This is very interesting, does it indicate that if you take a searched word/phrase of 30,000 p/a and get the .cc domain then you have a good chance of getting first page of the search rankings if the other TLDs are the only competitors?

soggyindo

Thanks for that great advice nielsencl - I'm not sure this info is anywhere else, and it's pretty basic info for us newb types to get our head around.

My question is, for your .in domain that gets revenue (I assume it's in parking) - it's not type in traffic right, you're not getting people looking for keyword.in, with that extension?

If so, traffic is from search engine results, is that right? Why then would your parked page "beat" other, keyword rich, linked, fully "developed" sites for this traffic? Do you need to have parking that allows content?

Or perhaps you need merely very low (i.e. no) competition for a term?

But...my parked pages aren't even picked up by google as existing!

Or...perhaps the traffic and/or SEO is through links - that you've set up cos it's hand regged? (That's not allowed though, is it?)

Mysteries, mysteries. Anyway, I'd love to hear your (or anyone else's) thoughts.

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DiggleNamer

good questions soggy - i hope we nubes get to the bottom of this!

nielsencl

"list-of-sex-positions" should match searches for "list of sex positions", "listofsexpositions", and to some extent searchs for the other keywords or combinations of the keywords. But this advantage by the domain name is small. It is only one aspect of how sites are ranked. For parking you would always get the domains that match the exact search order of the words that people use since you are competing with developed sites and need every possible advantage. For a site, it's better to have a domain without hyphens that will be shorter and look better.

No. The keywords in the domain are only a small part of the ranking forumula. My point here is about parking and I'm just saying that the TLD really does not seem to be a factor plus or minus for a parked domain or site.

Maybe, but I have my domains parked with a service that allows me to publish links to my domains. Most don't allow you to do ANYTHING, but if search engine traffic is allowed, then why not allow links to the domains as long as no incentive or fraud is involved?

I have seen one of my domains get a top listing for the keyword phrase of the domain. But it's not a huge one. It works because the keyword phrase is an exact match. If there is much compitition then the only chance you have to be seen is with a real site or a parking service that offers what seem like real sites.

Hint: If you have a domain with a KW phrase that has a high bid price, then you will not need as much traffic/clicks to make some money. You don't need much over a year to pay the renewal fee. At the end of a year if the domain has not paid for itself, SELL IT or drop it! Don't throw good money after bad unless you really love the domain or think it will have sales potential someday. Just remember you could be waiting for a long time. I don't buy many for sales potential, I buy for parking income. If I can also buy one with sales potential then that's a plus.

This really improves your chances greatly... :-)

If your domain has existing link traffic or has potential for type-in traffic then you can park anywhere. If you can't earn money from the traffic by looking at the stats and trying different KW and design, then move to another service. They are all different and one may do great and another will suck.

But if you have domains that are new or have little potential, then park them with a service that allows you to do a little honest promotion. Or another option you may have is to put a site on the domain and promote it to get links and traffic. Then you should be able to use a parking service that only allows "existing" links and SE traffic.

I strongly advise you to check the TOS of the parking service and ALSO contact them and ask them to make sure. They will appreciate your interest in following their rules and it will keep you from getting your account closed because you did something you should not have done.

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Sleepys

What parking company is this?

soggyindo

Thanks for a great and thorough reply! Rep added.

The comment above is the $64,000 question for me. I can't seem to get mine to budge from last (or no) google position seemingly whatever I do (and that's with sites on them!) Getting parked domains to do this seems like walking to the moon.

If anyone has any clues or links to this mystery, they would be highly appreciated, to say the least!!!

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nielsencl

Well, for a site you have an easier job to get traffic, since you can have many pages where you control the content. With parked page at most services, you only have one page title, one description, and really onely one "page" that you can optimize. For my sites I never worry about rankings. Many people do, and you can, but I am more focused purely on increasing the traffic. I know that if I do keyword research to find out what phrases people are using, and add them all through my site that it will get found.

Parking pages are much harder, so for those I slant all the optimization toward the keyword phrase of the domain, since Google will do a match to it without the spaces that someone types in. This can work well if the keyword phrase is getting searches AND it is not too popular. I don't check for rankings, but I have seen a couple of my parked domains at or near the top for the keyword phrase. I think I'm able to get some of those from optimizing the domain and getting a number of links to the domain where some have the same phrase.

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