Domain with keywords and dashes

[midium]

I want to register a domain. I want to use the main two keywords for it. Let's say my site is about boat rental. "Boat rental" is very much searched in the web. My preference would have been to register boatrental.com, but this one is registered. boat-rental.com is also taken (all the other options with .net, .biz, .info and so on, are not available either).

The options I am considering would be to register: boatrental-web.com (available) or boat-rental-web.com (also available). I understand that for SEO purposes, the second option is better than the first one, and following the fact that I am already using a dash in my name, I see there would be little difference between these two in terms of usability.

Basically I have four questions regarding the domain strategy:

1. Is it worthwile to have my keywords in my domain (which are searched for a lot) with dashes, even adding an extra word such as "web" or would it be preferable to look for another domain, which is not keyword rich but does not have any dashes in it?
2. Would you choose boat-rental-web.com over boatrental-web.com?
3. Does the word "web" in the name penalise at all? That is, from a SEO point of view, would boat-rental.com & boat-rental-web.com be considered similar for searche engines? (both have the two keywords in it, one next to the other)
4. Considering that some people search for boat rentalS (plural), although less than the singular form (assumption), would I be better off registering boat-rentals-web (plural) rather than boat-rental-web (sigular). Would the plural also pick up the searches for the singular?

Thank you very much in advance for your advice in this matter.

 

[suntech]

I've been looking for primo names with dashes for a while.
Click here for great tool for searching

Good luck!
J.K.

 

[yandig]

I would consider finding a brandable, made-up .com instead of the dash-filled domain.
However, in answer to your questions...

1) Preferable to have a domain with no dashes, especially for resale.
2) I would choose boat-rental-web over boatrental-web...looks more professional to have the three words seperated by dashes.
3) No significant penalty for the word 'web', although some search engines will like boat-rental a little bit better then boat-rental-web
4) This depends on how the singular and plural names sound, but generally, i'd go with the singular, especially if it gets more google results, etc...

Welcome to Namepros!

 

[midium]

Thank you for your post, SunTech. It is a great tool to save time looking the availability of the different names. However, once I know about the availability I still do not know about which one to choose.

Thank you Yanding for help. Please note that I am not planning to sell it but want to build a web page & generate business from it. My intention is to have most of the traffic come from SE. I understand that it would be better to have the keywords with no dashes. But if I cannot have this, would you say it is better to choose the option boat-rental-web.com (main keywords with dashes + an extra word), or something which does not have the keywords on it, such as rentingboats.com (these terms are seldom searched for). THanks again.

 

[gazzip]

If you plan on using it for business - ie boat rentals, I would take a guess and say your target audience is not world wide ???

If so - have you considered something like : Bermuda-Boatrental.com ? where the first part would be your area/town or another usefull word relative to who you intend to rent to.

just a thought


.

 

[midium]

Thank you Gazzip for input. I am going to have several areas, so cannot fix it to one area only. However, you input suggests a good & new approach I did not think of. It may be a good idea to use subdomains for the different areas, i.e. bermuda.boat-rental-web.com (although it might be becoming a little long)... This brings an additional question... Would SE's consider Bermuda as another keyword in this subdomain?

 

[Damion]

Yes it SE would considder this a additional keyword.

Also i would like to suggest to drop the web and the three dashes idea.
I mean boat-rental-web.com just don't make any sense and looks very unprofessional and spammy. But that's regarding the example you provided.

Why not go for a lesser known extension? with a variation of adding 1 dash if necessary. There must be some extension free?
What are the exact terms you are looking for?

If you don't want to post in public then PM me, i can be very creative with these kind of things.

But regarding your innitial question, keywords are indeed important for SE's.

 

[midium]

Thank you Damion for your offer, I might just do that. If dashes are considered keywords, then things may become a little bit simpler. I could look for a 1 word which makes sense (for example boatweb or something like that), and add my keywords as a subdomain. That is: boat-rental.boatweb.com. Would my keywords have the same importance for search engines in a subdomain such as the one described as the words boat & rental in boat-rental-web.com?

 

[accent]

Key words in the sub-domain would only apply to that sub-domain.

You will find the more experienced domainers are dead set against dashes (and usually against anything but .com). The no - dashes rule is valid if you are asking people to type in your web address from print media or TV/Radio - dashes tend to be left out, landing your customer at your competitor's website. When the customer clicks a link it does not matter if the domain has dashes, is a strange extension, or is 63 characters long. (Although too-long names and too many dashes are considered spammy).

If you can afford a $30 to $50 per year registration fee, I would consider country code extensions. .VC and .HN (at dotster.com) have nearly everything still available. .WS, .TK, and .BE are cheaper, but well populated.

 

[peter phillips]

1. Since your intention is to have most of the traffic from the SEs, I guess it is worthwhile to have your keywords in the domain with dashes.
2. Between the two I would choose boat-rental-web.
3. I don't think there will be a penalty for the word 'web' in the name. boat-rental.com & boat-rental-web.com won't be considered the same, some SEs may rank boat-rental.com higher than boat-rental-web.com.
4. Singular or plural, depends on the name. In this case singular is better than the plural.

 

[midium]

After reading a few posts about the matter and doing a little research, I have decided not to go with the route of the the subdomain. Main reasons is that each subdirectory is considered completely a new site, so it cannot profit from PR of the main/entry page.

Thank you Accentnepal for your comment. I would rather not get any ccTLD, unless I was planning to go local to a certain country and then get that specific ccTLD. I understand that ccTLD's are favoured with local search engines but do not know how they behave on SE from other countries. Moreover, I think that unless you are from that specific country, they do no good.

Thank you Peter Phillis for your comment. You described what my line of thought at this time.

However, there are quite some people (both in threads I read and articles about the matter and in this same thread) that do not reccomend it. Basically the reasons are, as well portrayed by Damion:

I mean boat-rental-web.com just don't make any sense and looks very unprofessional and spammy. But that's regarding the example you provided.

This, I understand and have little to say in favour of the name. Besides this one, the other reason against dashed domains is that they are more difficult to remember, word of mouth, communicate in the "real world", and so on...

This brings me to the next step. Being practical here, how often do people type a url from their heads right into the browser? My impression (and this is just based from my personal experience as a user), is that people type url's very little, except for the very well known web pages (amazon, google, yahoo, or by the name of well known companies, pepsi, etc...).

I think that the way people get to most webs (I would guess, 95% of them) is by "clicking" from SE's, links, their own bookmarks and so on. However, this is just my opinion. Unfortunately, I do not have a web page yet, so I cannot look at the statistics to see how are people getting to my web page. For this reason I would highly appreciate any of you who are much more experienced than myself to say, from your own experience & own webs, what % of people you would say are getting to your web page by "clicking" and how many are getting there by "typing". Do they "click" or do they "type". That is the question

 

[accent]

The problem is that stats record known search engines, they list site referrals, then they lump type ins, bookmarks, and "unknown" into one category. And the "unknown" is more than half the total visitors. So the number of type-ins cannot be determined, at least with Cpanel stats. I agree that it is probably pretty small.

 

[Damion]

Regarding the question how man people actually type in the URL Midium there is quite a substantial amount of traffic that derives from this.
This is a excerpt from an article that gives some insight although not officially confirmed.

No one knows for sure how much Web traffic comes from type-ins, and Google and Yahoo execs won't discuss it. But privately, one Yahoo official estimates that type-ins could make up 15 percent of its search business. Marchex, a Seattle-based public startup whose strategy rests largely on type-in traffic, estimates that it accounts for nearly 10 percent of the global paid search market, which is projected to soar from $9 billion this year to $23 billion in 2009.

If you really want to get going PM me what you want to establish and i will brainstorm with you to get the domain you need.

 

[midium]

Thanks Damion for the article. Quite enlightening. The article basically says that some people put in the keywords directly into the browser (not search engine) to look for their specific keywords. The article mentions two sources and says that according to these, about 10/15% of all internet traffic is type in.

However, when I mentioned if people click or type, I was referring more to statistics of each one's web pages. As said, I do not have a web page yet, so I cannot check the statistics on how many people reach my web page from search engines's results / links, and how many reach my web page by typing the url in the browser.

From article read and own personal experience as a user, and following the fact that unfortunately I cannot have my keywords in the url without the hyphens, I cannot look for the kind of traffic I would get by people just directly typing in the words I need in the browser. Following this, I think that a hyphened domain can be the best alternative to have a higher overall traffic (from all sources). If anybody thinks I am leaving behind anything important, please let me know.