http://www.internet-marketing-blog.com/2006/03/10/parsing-keywords-in-urls/

Great minds think alike, eh?

It looks as if your site maybe sandboxed. For example doing an exact search in Google for a short text phrase taken from your home page |”located in new york and india”| does not find your site. The way out is to obtain some links from “trusted” directories like dmoz and trusted sites in your sector like webdesign.about.com.

I think in practise the same effort has to be put into emarketing your new website whatever domain name you choose.

I have the same question as vingold has, but slightly different one.
Say one site is with its brand name (e.g. www.nike.com) and one with keyword (e.g. www.sports-shoes.com) And everything is same (meta tags, title, link pop, etc) which one is get top rank for the keyword “sports shoes”. ?

i guess www.sports-shoes.com will be top rank than branded one. How much effort needed to out rank that unbranded site?

Let’s get rid of the branding issue first.

Ideally companies would like to build a brand and some of the most successful brands are made-up words, for example Exxon, Kodak, Epson, Comcast, Cisco etc., etc. If you want to build a brand that is the way to go and gobbledegook will do nicely.

Although branding is very important, sometimes you may be more concerned about position in the SERPs. For example let’s say you are building an affiliate site for sports shoes. You have decided that your strategy is to have thousands of content pages of reviews of various sports shoes with your affiliate links. Branding is not an issue, so what domain should you choose sports-shoes-review.com or sportsshoesreview.com?

Answer sports-shoes-review.com and here’s why. When your site gets unsolicited links they may be in two basic forms one where there is some keyword anchor text and one where the linker just anchors the url:

For advice on choosing the right sports shoes go to <a href=”http://www.sports-shoes-review.com”>Sports Shoes Review</a>.

For advice on choosing the right sports shoes go to <a href=”http://www.sports-shoes-review.com”>http://www.sports-shoes-review.com</a>.

In the second case because you have used a keyword1-keyword2-keyword3 domain the anchor text will still contain your keywords. If you had chosen sportsshoesreview.com the search engines would not see the keywords but would see only one made-up word sportsshoesreview.

So the bottom line is, more interested in SERPs than branding then go for the hyphens. Keep it to one or two hyphens only and make sure it reads well as the name of your site.

Will it make a difference? Yes but a small difference. Is it worth doing? In most cases yes and I would take http://www.sports-shoes-review.com/nike-shox.html over http://www.sportsshoesreview.com/pdp.jsp?productId=99057&categoryId=304203&productGroup=90793&catalogId=1 every time.

Sports Shoes Review sounds good as a site name doesn’t it and sports-shoes-review.com is still available as I write

I understand that in regards to file names - hyphenation is the way to go.

Can you speculate on what the results might be in regards to domain name?

For instance - all other things being equal (exact in content, inbound and outbound links, etc.) - if I was to do a search on “seo blog”, which would rank higher?

seo-blog.com or seoblog.com? I think we can assume you’d be less than efficient to do seo_blog.com

I believe I read elsewhere in SEO literature (maybe even written by you) that in the end domain name plays a very small part in SERP. That all other things (meta tags, links, keyword file names, etc.) carry much more weight than the domain name.

But I was just curious.

Ill be checking back to see the outcome of the test with MSN. Thanks for sharing your information.