One domain for search engines, one for customer

Is this a good idea?

[namniboose]

I am thinking of getting a domain name with 28 characters (excluding the www and the .com) to use in the search engines and pointing a short name at it which incorporates branding, is easy to type etc. (if I point it at the registrar I don't have a problem with Google).

My first question is: is 28 characters too long to be indexed by some search engines? And secondly, is this a good idea to have one domain for the S.E.s and one for the customer?

Thanks for your wisdom.

[twoline]

Even if you do this in a way that works for google and other SEs (as far as redirects, 301, etc.), I think it's confusing for customers.

So you brand short.com and that redirects to reallyreallyreallyreallylong.com. Unless your visitors are very non-web-savvy, they'll notice this change of URLs in the address bar and think, "what's going on here?". It wouldn't be something that would create trust with me as a user. It makes me think there's something fishy going on. If you then want me to input a credit card or other personal information so that I can transact, I'm not likely to do it.

If it's not an ecommerce site, then maybe it doesn't matter, but it sounded like it was.

twoline

[namniboose]

Hi twoline,

You have a point there. However.......the url pointing would be masked so that they would see the short url (and they don't currently take credit cards online).

Most people would find them via the internet, however, under the long name, so the short name would just be mainly for giving to people over the phone and for referrals who would probably put the short domain name in.

It's a small vacation rental so referrals and repeat visitors are a factor to consider but they will get way more visitors directly from the search engines.

Just how important are keywords in the domain name for the search engines? I'm finding it really hard to decide what would be best. Is it worth sacrificing some of the branding? Maybe there isn't a hard and fast answer.