So I hate to bring up a topic that seems to be discussed to death, but I didn't see anything concerning this specifically.. Let's say I have "big blue widgets" as my longtail I'm targeting, so I'd like bigbluewidgets.com of course, however, unavailable.
Well let's say I could either get bigbluewidgets.co,.biz,.cm, etc. (good ones are all taken), or however, I could get a .com if I go with big-bluewidgets.com (all the good "big-blue-widgets" are gone as well). Would this be preferable to settling on an uncommon TLD?
I'm speaking in terms of SEO by the way, specifically a niche site.
Hmm.....interesting question.
Dashes are preferable to an underscore between words. And of course periods are pretty much a big negatory.
The potential problem I see with big-bluewidgets for SEO is that if people are not putting bluewidgets as one word in the search query you will most likely not show up for the people who type blue widgets as two separate words.
This would be why the good big-blue-widgets domains are already taken. I know this sounds a little off since if you did have the bigbluewidgets domain you would show up for the words together or separated. But it is "my" understanding that once you use the -as a signifier in the domain that the crawler will look at any letters NOT separated by the dash as a supposed word to match against the words in a search query.
I may be mistaken on this, but I would not use the big-bluewidgets against the other competition of big-blue-widgets or bigbluewidgets to rank in the SERPs. (That is if you/I thought that exact match domains were a significant advantage to ranking.)
Maybe instead you could get a domain of say largebluewidgets or large-blue-widgets and then use big blue widgets in your meta tags and anchor text instead. Then use content and links to out rank the users of the more traditional domain of your widget.
You know, as the domains get harder to come by (Dirty Domainers!! Lulz) I have not been to concerned about exact match domains anymore. I could use y8fgh34.com for any product and still rank above the fold against exact match domains with my code, content, & links so long as the market is not over saturated.
That and I have found that most people don't pay a whole lot of attention to the actual domain name. Unless you are building a Brand and using offline methods of promotion where you need for the potential customers to remember the site's domain to type in later, exact match domains are not as important as they use to be for SEO.
The last week or so I have been laughing at the Yellow Pages ads on TV using yp.com instead of
YP.COM - Yellow Pages, the new YELLOWPAGES.COM. I guess they feel that typing yellowpages is just too much for people to handle today. So they are taking the Yellow Pages brand that started in 1886 and cutting it down to just YP. So, do you really need an exact match domain anymore?
Now a days Content is King and Links are the Nectar of the GODS!! LOL
Oh and Steve Krug who wrote a book on website optimization titled, "
Don't Make Me Think" hit the nail right on the head!! Lulz (That link is to a 10 page summary of the book. It is a GOOD overview worth reading. I have the whole book but have not read it yet!! LOL)
