purchasing domain names

[knoxy]

I hope I've got the right forum for this question, but here goes,
Over the past few months I've been trying to keep up with the posts in this and other forums but I don't think I quite understand what people mean by "choose your keywords and then try to buy the domain name". Does this mean that I buy (or try to) all of the domains that match my keywords or just the one that matches my primary keyword.

I'm a bit confused as to what I would do if I bought all of the domain names (10 at the moment)
Do I put doorway pages in them or what??? What is the score as to mirroring???

Thanks in advance from a very confused Brit.

Edited by: knoxy

[oilman]

>>Does this mean that I buy (or try to) all of the domains that match my keywords

I definitly know a lot of folks that have done this. The downside it the cost not to mention if you want to do it right you need seperate IPs for each domain, which can be quite costly as well if you don't have a decent host.

>>What is the score as to mirroring???

Don't do it. If you get caught with exactly the same site under different names - it's all over for those domains.

At the end of the day having your keywords in the URL isn't worth the hassle of managing it (in my experience at least). There a some SEs that give it no weighting at all and the ones who do take it into account give it very little weighting. It's become somewhat of a recognized spam technique.

[knoxy]

oilman

Thanks a lot for your advice. I'll take it as a no-no then.

[tedster]

But, if you can use a (single) domain name that includes a keyword, it can help get more clickthroughs, from what I've heard. It's not that the SE's respond so well to it, but the users seem to.

Someone here (rc?) mentioned a study that showed users perceive the keyword-in-domain-name site to be more relevant. When deciding where to click they give more weight to the domain names than they do to the description.

One thing I have discovered: with a keyword in the name of the site, it's very easy to get too high a keyword density in the copy if I'm not paying attention.

[rcjordan]

>When deciding where to click they give more weight to the domain names than they do to the description.
Right, though the study mentioned in that post was my own informal one, I believe.... however I've seen similar written up elsewhere. Objectively review how you select returns and I suspect you'll find the same.

I am a BIG believer in the power of domain names, whether they help rank in the algos or not.

[2_much]

Tedster, what do you consider "too high a keyword density?"

Knoxy, I've read in a couple of different places that some engines really like having keywords in the domain names. Excite is one of these. Websites with keywords in the domain seem to do well in excite. It is reccommended to use dashes to break up the words if it's a keyword phrase so they'll be recognized as unique keywords. I'm with RC on this one.

As to mirror sites. I've been trying to find an answer to this question myself, and what I have gathered is that the text must be changed around; each doorpage must be about 65% unique. I'm not sure how this applies to the HTML sequence. Does someone know whether the HTML sequence has to be changed as well, or is changing the text and template enough? Seth Wilde also mentioned that the link structure is checked by the engines and must not be the same. I'm still figuring out what he means by this, but you may understand this better.

Good luck Knoxy!
2M

[tedster]

>>Tedster, what do you consider "too high a keyword density?"<<

Once the density on a page gets well into the double digits -- say more than 15% -- ranking still may pop on some engines but often get hopelessly buried on others. Since I do "one size fits all" pages and don't cloak, I use the WPG Page Critic for this. WPG does ongoing research and they keep providing updates to their software owners. So I check my pages for several different engines in Page Critic and then try to strike a happy medium across the board.

Many engines have declared war against keyword stuffing/spam. They each set a threshold, which they seem to tweak all the time. What they are trying to set the algo for is rewarding natural style language, rather than attempts to force keywords into the page at every turn.

I still see pages with insanely high density in top spots sometimes, but overall the rankings I get are better if I keep a lid on it.