So from a purely seo point of view which domain name would provide the best overall results for a real estate site about Flatcity Kansas?
Looks to me like you'd be ok with either flatcity-kansas-real-estate.com or flatcity-real-estate.com.
Althought they will provide slightly different results the flatcity-real-estate.com seems to produce slightly higher numbers in searches done at the GoTo tool.
This is not set in stone however as there are a considerable number of searches done including the state name in there too. The state name will also cover ground that the other wouldn't and still be in a relevant position under real estate. So either or will produce satisfactory results.
Glad I could help. You really should get out more toolman...all work and no play makes you crazy ;)
Yeah I know. I've been waiting for Realtor.com to expire so I could snag that one ;)
I was once told that realtor is trademarked. Hard to believe, it's such a commonly used word.
It is. You can be a real estate agent and sell real estate and not be a Realtor. A Realtor belongs to the National Association of Realtors...it's a club for people who can talk more than you can about stuff that makes no sense and they eventually wear you down into submission by overwhelming you with information. Then you buy the house that they pick out for you ;)
Thats It! Thank you...I've been wondering what the heck happend to me for the last three years :)
D. None of the above.
They are going to search on "flat city" if it's a 2-word city name. And, if it is a 2-worder, they are going to run these together in the search box, i.e. flatcity, about 10% of the time.
Kansas? Spelled out? Not very often. "KS" is the search preference, though they probably were too lazy to type it in the first time. Real estate? That probably wasn't in their first try either.
Destination websites (hotels, motels, real estate agencies, restaurants) go numb when I tell them that they're competing on the town name, period.
My preference:
FlatCity.KansasGuide.com/real-estate
I try to get as many keywords in the domain name without going too far. This so far has worked very good for directories and Ses. We know Flat City would be easy to target.
RC are taking branding into consideration with your selection?
Absolutely. If you're on the SERP and get read, that url will draw the click, IMO. More importantly, you're leveraging third-level domains, as paynt has been discussing lately.
And, if toolman is going for "real estate," there are threads here that push directory names as kw's as being more attractive to the algos than domains.... though I'm not sure I'm ready to commit to that.
It's worked for me on small sites. As in /hatstuff/ and /bowstuff/ being two different product lines on a free subdomain site, as well as similar occurrence on regular domain site.
In a couple of instances, it was actually /keywordrunon/keywordrunon.html that did nicely.
Mine are not typical because of small size, and keywords that aren't very competitive. But it's just as easy for me to put them into a directory as in the root, except for dealing with duplicates in the graphics files.
In cases where I used the directories,it was the directories that did well in the searches. On another recent site, I put all in the root, and the index page comes up for the keywords rather than the subsidiary product page.
Where there a couple of different products, the directories make it easier for cataloging the product photos, which is how I accidentally started doing it.
Added:
OK, I just double checked Google. I've got a directory coming up #9 with 121,000 found using /inspirational-gifts/ hyphenated. One page only for that keyword phrase - the index page of the directory, but the keyword is used in link text throughout. It's a 12 page site.
That site has almost the first 15 spots coming up at FAST for another phrase; however, with the recent change, Alta is no longer being kind with this. It's Google it's worked with consistently.
