Alright, so I have a slight situation. I'm going to ask my question with an example: Let's say I'm a dentist and I want my url to be my name. Also Let's say I register NewYorkDentist.com. Obviously NewYorkDentist.com has an SEO advantage over MyName.com for the term New York Dentist (considering all things equal). How can I take use the SEO advantage that NewYorkDentist.com has while still having my site hosted as myname.com? I hope my question is clear enough with the example I provided. Any info would be appreciated.
If I understand you correctly, you can create either subdomains and/or subdirectories within the site (ex: myname.com/newyorkdentist/ or newyorkdentist.myname.com) to get url address to contain the naming advantage. This may not be as good as having the domain NewYorkDentist.com but, meets the criteria you seem to be after. Hope this helps...
I guess i could do that. So then, there is no way to get NewYorkDentist.com to show up in the SERPs for "New York Dentist" and the site be hosted as Myname.com (redirect?)
Not really. You'd have to create a Web site for newyorkdentist.com What you can do though, is set up a site at myname.com/directory and then point that directory (or folder) over to newyorkdentist.com so that the web pages at myname.com/directory appear to really be at newyorkdentist.com (you'll have to have both domains pointed to the same server in order for this to work).
If you are in business and you can get the domain name newyorkdentist.com, then it is better to host your site under it instead of myname.com. The internet is based on keyword search and myname.com won't be competitive. Always use the primary keyword phrase in your domain name if possible. If needed, go to new-york-dentist.com if you have to. Just get the keyword phrase into the domain name. You then can SEO a landing page or the "about" page for your name. Your name is usually unique enough to get good ranking by using standard SEO
So5: I've just done the very same thing as Catanich for a client, and he is completely correct. The name of this client is searched for, but with a bit of basic seo he now ranks #1 for that. His domain name has some of his keywords in it, and after some seo he ranks #1 for them too. In your situation, I would be tempted to put the myname.com on another server (buy some off of ebay for £5 per year) and stick up a couple of pages about yourself. Then with a few backlinks to both they should both begin to rank in the engines, and you've got two sites working for you, rather than one. Hope that helps
Personally I would go for 1 site rather than 2. Also I would choose whichever domain was more brandable and forget about keywords as long as the site ranks well.