How best to use domain name?

shayser

A friend of mine just opened a new business. It's a service, aimed at a local market - the town and county where it's located and the surrounding counties. He registered a .ie for the business name, i.e., "mycompanyname".ie. He was also lucky to get a fantastic (IMHO) short, snappy, very generic domain name that it might be said could encompass the whole sector.

He has a web site in an early state at "mycompanyname".ie and the second domain name, the "sector".ie address, redirects to that. The little amount of traditional advertising to date is for "mycompanyname".ie.

I was wondering how best to use the domain names. Looking at the indexing sites and the search engines, they all explicitly state not to register sites that redirect. And which would be the best name to use full stop, if it makes any difference.

Any advice?

WebGeek

I would just use the main name from now on, not the redirect name. The 301 redirect is great for seo if you are moving web pages or changing the name of the site, but that's all.

shayser

Thanks. Is the relevancy of the domain name of any importance to search engine indexing and seo, e.g. is would cars.ie be better than murphymotors.ie

WebGeek

Ok course it depends on what keywords you are optimising for. Cars.ie is a great domain name but the keyword 'cars' is generic and competition is extremely high. MurphyMoters.ie would be a more targeted and easier to rank for the company name i.e. Murphys Moters.
So I would go with the more descriptive name unless you need to target the keyword "cars" and have a hugh marketing budget

mneylon

WebGeek wrote: »

Ok course it depends on what keywords you are optimising for. Cars.ie is a great domain name but the keyword 'cars' is generic and competition is extremely high. MurphyMoters.ie would be a more targeted and easier to rank for the company name i.e. Murphys Moters.
So I would go with the more descriptive name unless you need to target the keyword "cars" and have a hugh marketing budget

What you're saying doesn't make any sense

If someone is looking for "Murphy Motors" then they already know who you are etc.,

If, which is more likely, they're looking for the product you sell eg. "cars" then having "cars.ie" makes more sense and if you have the keyword rich domain you WILL get the traffic and the sales.

WebGeek

Blacknight wrote: »

What you're saying doesn't make any sense

If someone is looking for "Murphy Motors" then they already know who you are etc.,

If, which is more likely, they're looking for the product you sell eg. "cars" then having "cars.ie" makes more sense and if you have the keyword rich domain you WILL get the traffic and the sales.

You'd be very surprised how many businesses cannot be found even when you type their company name. Say someone types in "murphysmoters" and you don't rank for your own name, chances are they contact some other company when, in fact, they were looking for you.

As I said before, if you feel like optimising for 'cars' then you must have a ton of advertising money to burn. It's a highly competitive keyword and you have zero chance of ranking on the first page. Also, 'cars' is too generic and not at all targeted - better to go for 'Car sales Dublin' or 'Car repairs Mallow'. Would bring a much better ROI than 'cars'.

DoMyBooks

I dont claim to be any sort of an expert on SEO but I have a number websites.
My businessname.ie and my profession/county.com as in wexfordplumber.com

profession/county was a much much easier to get any sort of a ranking in google for the keywords I needed.

Look at the results of this google search

http://www.google.ie/search?q=webdesign+cork&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a

From the little bit I know I would go for cars.ie all the way.

jmcc

WebGeek wrote: »

You'd be very surprised how many businesses cannot be found even when you type their company name.

What makes you think that you have some kind of monopoly on SEO knowledge?

As I said before, if you feel like optimising for 'cars' then you must have a ton of advertising money to burn. It's a highly competitive keyword and you have zero chance of ranking on the first page.

With a category killer domain like 'cars.ie', you would certainly be high in the SERPs.

Also, 'cars' is too generic and not at all targeted - better to go for 'Car sales Dublin' or 'Car repairs Mallow'. Would bring a much better ROI than 'cars'.

The importance of a keyword rich domain name and the optimisation of a site and its keywords seems to be getting confused here.

Regards...jmcc

WebGeek

jmcc wrote: »

What makes you think that you have some kind of monopoly on SEO knowledge?

No, but it is how I make my living.

jmcc wrote: »

With a category killer domain like 'cars.ie', you would certainly be high in the SERPs.

Depends on how you optimise your site. If you somehow had the funds to acquire 'cars.ie' and you optimise the site for phrases like "oversized ear buds for bunny rabbits" then I guess it would be a snap to rank in the SERPs for those keywords.

But say you wanted to optimise for the keyword 'cars', then you have no chance without a huge outlay of time, effort and money. Try it yourself - type 'cars' into google and see the top 10 results. All 800lb gorillas. You think by virtue of owning 'cars.ie' that you will outrank carzone.ie, cbg.ie and carsireland.ie?

mneylon

WebGeek wrote: »

But say you wanted to optimise for the keyword 'cars', then you have no chance without a huge outlay of time, effort and money. Try it yourself - type 'cars' into google and see the top 10 results. All 800lb gorillas. You think by virtue of owning 'cars.ie' that you will outrank carzone.ie, cbg.ie and carsireland.ie?

Nobody has said that, however, if you did have a category killer domain, which is what both Jmcc and I have been talking about, you'd be able to rank a lot faster and easier than somerandomthing.tld

jmcc

WebGeek wrote: »

Depends on how you optimise your site. If you somehow had the funds to acquire 'cars.ie' and you optimise the site for phrases like "oversized ear buds for bunny rabbits" then I guess it would be a snap to rank in the SERPs for those keywords.

Obviously you are unfamiliar with the .ie registration process. You don't "acquire" .ie domain names in the same way you can purchase a used .com domain.

But say you wanted to optimise for the keyword 'cars', then you have no chance without a huge outlay of time, effort and money. Try it yourself - type 'cars' into google and see the top 10 results. All 800lb gorillas. You think by virtue of owning 'cars.ie' that you will outrank carzone.ie, cbg.ie and carsireland.ie?

If you optimise the site for car sales (cars.ie seems to be targeted at car rentals) then you would have an edge over those other sites in that the domain is an exact match to a search term. And what's more you can potentially get direct navigation traffic.

Regards...jmcc

WebGeek

Blacknight - Ranking faster and easier is relative to the keyword your targeting. The example above is 'cars.ie'. You won't outrank carzone.ie for the keyword 'cars' without massive funds, even if you did own cars.ie. Doesn't matter how keyword rich the domain is - carzone has years of optimisation and spent massively to get where they are. Just saw an add for them on the box earlier.

JMCC - Acquiring a .ie domain name is only marginally harder than acquiring a .com domain, providing you know how to do it

jmcc

WebGeek wrote: »

JMCC - Acquiring a .ie domain name is only marginally harder than acquiring a .com domain, providing you know how to do it

Why am I thinking of that scene in the movie "Godfather II"?

Regards...jmcc

WebGeek

Exactly. I make the IEDR an offer thay can't refuse!

jmcc

WebGeek wrote: »

Exactly. I make the IEDR an offer thay can't refuse!

That's from the "Godfather I" movie. The scene I was thinking of was the one with Don Corleone and the landlord.

Regards...jmcc

Peanut

It's difficult to tell exactly how much of a help it is to have search keywords in your domain.

On the whole though, I think it's probably overstated. Just doing a highly scientific test search for "car rentals" on google.com and only 2/10 results have either term in the domain.

It will more than likely work better for .ie targetted searches though, as generally the Irish sites are smaller and there are fewer back links, so it doesn't take as much Google juice to bump up your entry, compared to a generic search at least.

jmcc

Peanut wrote: »

It's difficult to tell exactly how much of a help it is to have search keywords in your domain.

On the whole though, I think it's probably overstated. Just doing a highly scientific test search for "car rentals" on google.com and only 2/10 results have either term in the domain.

This is the count of the term 'carrentals' in com/net/org/biz/info/mobi/asia is:

| keyword | com | net | org | biz | info | mobi | asia |
| carrental | 12367 | 1800 | 617 | 324 | 904 | 109 | 36 |

| keyword | com | net | org | biz | info | mobi | asia |
| car | 1607502 | 203793 | 130103 | 31953 | 97667 | 13265 | 3130 |

| keyword | com | net | org | biz | info | mob | asia |
| cars | 125643 | 14192 | 6123 | 2131 | 7372 | 1163 | 308 |


The figures above are the counts for the keywords in com/net/org/biz/info/mobi/asia TLDs as of 01/March/2010. (I haven't had a chance to run the April survey yet.) I ran a frequency analysis on the TLDs of about 5K keywords. Smaller strings such as 'car' will have a higher frequency.

Search engines, from what I remember, parse the domain stub (the part before the dot) when it comes to title weight.

It will more than likely work better for .ie targetted searches though, as generally the Irish sites are smaller and there are fewer back links, so it doesn't take as much Google juice to bump up your entry, compared to a generic search at least.

The Irish webspace is rather curious when it comes to SEO. The number of Joomla sites where the webdev has forgotten to change the index page title is quite high. In SEO terms there is a lot of opportunity because of the relatively poor state of SEO on Irish websites. The best are very good and the worst are very, very bad.

The preliminary results on Irish website usage over 243958 websites are:
| Website Type | Websites | Percentage |
| Active/unclassified | 128888 | 52.83 |
| Brand protection | 6728 | 2.76 |
| Inpage Redirect | 5711 | 2.34 |
| Forbidden | 3857 | 1.58 |
| Gov/Edu | 1463 | 0.60 |
| Holding Pages | 48856 | 20.03 |
|Duplicate Content | 932 | 0.38 |
| Parked | 9981 | 4.09 |
| Redirects | 36236 | 14.85 |
| Unavailable | 521 | 0.21 |
| In zone redirect | 785 | 0.32 |

The Active figure is a bit high as it some sites will be reclassified.

Regards...jmcc

Huskora

WebGeek wrote: »

You'd be very surprised how many businesses cannot be found even when you type their company name. Say someone types in "murphysmoters" and you don't rank for your own name, chances are they contact some other company when, in fact, they were looking for you.

As I said before, if you feel like optimising for 'cars' then you must have a ton of advertising money to burn. It's a highly competitive keyword and you have zero chance of ranking on the first page. Also, 'cars' is too generic and not at all targeted - better to go for 'Car sales Dublin' or 'Car repairs Mallow'. Would bring a much better ROI than 'cars'.

Thats a load of rubish, you do not have to burn loads of money in order to get business your way, you are right in saying it will be very hard to get to position 1 on the web but if you optimise it like this "cars limerick" or "car repairs limerick" then you could be onto a winner yet still having the word cars in your keyword list!!

WebGeek

Huskora wrote: »

Thats a load of rubish, you do not have to burn loads of money in order to get business your way, you are right in saying it will be very hard to get to position 1 on the web but if you optimise it like this "cars limerick" or "car repairs limerick" then you could be onto a winner yet still having the word cars in your keyword list!!

Bloddy hell! If you cared to read my previous posts, you'll see that is exactly the point I was making. Well done Einstein.

Huskora

my apolligies, your right sorry about that,