Domains names for feeder sites

Best strategy?

[spikedo55]

I want to develop a site that helps me drive traffic to my main site. Basically, the site will have 4 to 6 pages of overview content and then link to my main site. Regarding domain name, which would be the better move?

Purchase and put the same content on

www.firsthyphenatedkeyword.net
www.secondhyphenatedkeyword.net

or,

purchase and put the content on just

www.firsthypenatedkeyword-secondhyphenatedkeyword.com

Perhaps there is a third or fourth option. Any suggestions are most welcome. Thanks for the help.

[Philosopher]

Personally, I have found that your approach doesn't work very well anymore. With link popularity (or whatever name you want to call it) playing such an important role, your mini-sites aren't every going to rank very well and drive much traffic to you unless they have other sites with decent PR/linkpop linking to them, which they most likely won't if they are just feeder sites with no real valuable content.

As to your question, you wouldn't want the same content on two different domains as that would be picked up pretty quickly these days.

If you are really wanting to make it work, I would create an informational site. Not just a feeder site with a couple of pages, but a site with good valuable content that other sites would want to link to. It's more work, but the long-term results are well worth it. Going this route, you could get the site accepted at Yahoo and very possibly at the ODP (which you couldn't if it was just a fluff site). A listing with these two places would give you enough PR/linkpop that they could actually have an impact on your site.

[spikedo55]

I do have that site that you describe already. Its just that I'm having a hard time optimizing it for search engines.

My main site's domain is "1stword2ndword3rdword.com." All the TLDs for "1stword2ndword.com" are gone of course. So I was thinking of buying the domain "1stword-2ndword.net" and use it as a feeder site. Hopefully, with a bit of content, it would place much higher for searches on the 1stword2ndword keyword search than my current 1stword2ndword3rdword domain.

Sorry to be so complex. I hope everyone can follow this.

[Philosopher]

The domain name isn't going to have nearly the amount of influence on your ranking as I think you believe it will. In the past, yes, but not that much anymore (it mostly seems to help with the linktext of inbound links).

Obviously, you could link to it from your primary domain and give it some PR, but depending on the competitiveness of your target area, that is likely not going to be nearly enough to get you to the top of the rankings. As your primary domain likely already has at least a decent PR, you would probably have a much easier time finding a way to incorporate more content into that, than building the PR of a new site enough to get it to rank well IMHO.