Hi All, I am new to this forum, but look forward to meeting everyone here. I decided to register after being a long time lurker To give a little background on myself, I currently run an on-line business that sell's digital products to customers around the world. I am based in Scotland, and currently run only the one website. I produce all store content myself (with the help of a team of producers) and plan to sell content from other providers by the end of march. In all honestly I am quite new to SEO and "online business" in general, but I have a very good grasp of internet technologies, software development and anything technical. As my store dosen't bring in enough to sustain a comfortable living, I work full time as a Security Analyst for a large corporation. I would like this to change however, and my goal this year is to build up a series of websites that provide enough income to support my lifestyle (I guess this is everyones goal on here though ). Up until now my business has solely been marketed/advertised on forums related to the products I produce. This has done me very well in terms of getting strong organic traffic and building up a very good customer base (as well as Facebook 'fan' page). Since the products we produce are of high quality and well respected in various communities, I have only really focused on product development and less on marketing and advertising. I was sticking to the "word of mouth" being the best to get sales, which I don't feel is enough in this day and age. After recently discovering this forum and the Google Keyword Research Tool I found many "phrases" related to my business that have dot com domains available for them. I am curious to know if buying up "key phrase rich" domains would be an effective strategy for growing a business and attracting strong organic traffic to it? The process would be as follows: I buy a key phrase rich domain, build a landing page for it and do basic SEO (find best keywords/phrases, index it on various search engines, etc) and let the page attract traffic. Would this be enough to get it high ranking in the Google search results if the particular market was niche and not overly competitive? Take this scenario for example: Assume I own an on-line store that sells socks. I sell all different types of sock, but my store has a crazy name like "David's Sock Shop". Now unless people know my business name and search for that specifically my website would otherwise be much further down google lists for "sock shops" unless I invested a great deal into AdWords, directory submissions, article writing and link building strategies (Even then there is limited chance I would make the top 3 search results in google). After using the Google Keyword Research tool I discover that "Red Sports Socks" get's 11,000 EXACT searches per month. I discover the .com or .net domain name is available and I register this. I set up a basic landing page, do basic SEO and index the page/site. I set up links on the landing page that point to my site(s) and wait for re-directs to come from the various sites I set up. I keep my finger's crossed for "hits" that turn into customers! What kind of variables should I take into account for this type of strategy and is this an advisable way to build traffic to a site? David
I apologise if I posted this in the wrong section. It seems like a 'cross-over' topic, though I could be wrong here