Hi all First of all introductions - this is my first post, im about to set up my first website, and have been reading through these forums. Many thanks to you all for such interesting and educational information, its been a pleasure to read! And i hope to learn much more in the future. Now on to my question: I have a specific topic in mind for my site, and am about to register the domain. I have come up with several different names. The best name in my opinion is a two word name which is extremely relevant to the site, and searched heavily in the search engines. Unsuprisingly, the .com and .net versions of this are taken, however .biz .info .org and .mobi are all available. What do you guys think is more important? Getting an address with the .com ending and sacrificing some of the relevance of the name, or choosing a really good name but not having the '.com'? I should point out that my site is solely information based, and will have an affiliate link in it, although its not really a hard sell page. One final related question on naming - is having the '-' character between two words in the name a bad idea? even if the two words are once again greatly searched in the search engines? (my original idea does not have this '-' however i have an idea for another site and the only relevant domain available would need a '-') Sorry if it was long winded - look forward to any help you can give me. Cheers!
Hi culvers, and welcome to the forums! If you don't mind me asking (and you can PM this to me if you like), what's the domain name and niche you're looking at? Maybe I can help you find a better domain name that's still relevant to the niche that's also available. In the meantime, to answer your question, the dash isn't a bad thing as long as you don't overdo it. I have one in my domain name, and in some cases can even help the search engines clarify what keywords you're really targeting. Such as "Experts Exchange" for example. If they didn't have the hyphen in their domain, the search engines would think they were trying to rank for "Experts Exchange" as well as "Expert Sex Change" -- which I don't think they want to optimize their site for.
You can add some generic word to the end of your desired domain such as mydomainshop.com or mydomainnow.com, you get the idea. If not, just take the .org version since it's still available. Generally, try to avoid more than one dash if you really need to put one.
IMHO: users tend to remeber easily a .com extension and the reason is quite simple: they remember the brand forgetting the extension and when they need to find your site they simply type in what they remember and add the .com
Hello Culvers and welcome to DP. Personally I prefer to avoid domain names with hyphens as well as domains that do NOT end in .com. Users ofter perceive domains with hyphens and non-.com TLDs as less than legitimate. They don't really hurt you from a ranking perspective, but they can hurt you from a user perspective if users don't click on your links in the SERPs because they are not seen as legit. I made a post on my blog about using hyphens in URLs recently. Feel free to give it a read. Perhaps you'll find something useful there. Again, welcome!