Morning all, Previous domains I've purchased have all been "easy-reading" URLS - brandable domains I guess which make sense to people entering them into a browser. For the first time I'm thinking of buying a domain based purely on search volume. Lets say, for example, that I've found that the term "Big Red Handbags" is getting searched for loads of times a day ... and the domain "Big-Red-Handbags.com" is available for purchase. How much value will Google assign to my domain given the fact that the search term is included in my URL? Will the value be affected if the domain has hyphens in it (like above)? Thanks alot,
In the past that has worked great for me having the keyword in the domain has won me top 5 positions however that has been with 2 million or less results. I think if you put some efforts in for on page and off page SEO depending on how many other competitors you have, you could rank on the first page with out little effort. However it is best to put in some good SEO as well to ensure you stay on the first page. There are a lot of factors which this boils down to.
Apart from doing the SEO you need to brand that domain name, I think there are good potential picking up such domain name which have potential keywords.
I think you need to decide whether it is more important to have a good branding name or an SEO target domain, I find a domain with keywords is better if the business is solely an online one. If the business has other components a good branding name maybe a better way to go. Though really this is only a small part of SEO which you should look at with your site.
For long term strategy keep it to domain names that you can brand. If you are looking to target the low hanging fruits, then go for domain names with exact phrases. Still its a lot easier to rank well for those kind of domain names. But don't over do it though, try to find shorter names.
It will help - debatably that Google assign some importance to just having the keywords in the URL - personally I'm doubtful, and even if this is the case, any benefit in comparison to ther factors (Page title, anchor links etc) would be minimal. Where is would help would be in picking up additional relevant keywords in your anchor text when people just link to you using the URL - i.e http://www.relevant-keyword.com Personally though, depending on the purpose of the site, I may still use the brandable domain. Keyword full URLs can look spammy an put people off of the site. If it's just an affiliate site or similar then that probably doesn't matter. PS. Do you post on F365?
Matt Cutts said about long URLs: I think Google has algorithms analyzing domain name too. So IMHO main rule here is not to over-optimize: www.Big-Red-Handbags.com/handbags/big-red-handbag.htm will look spammy for Google.
Jupps. www.Your-Main-Keyword.com as max.... But rather try to shorten it down to: www.main-keyword.com And yes, it still play a huge part of the SEO process.