My webmaster tells me that if I buy domain names that contain my keywords that that will help me rank better in the search engines. Should I go ahead and purchase all relevant domains?
If you are going to do it solely to rank well, no. Although it is through that your domain name influences your ranking slightly, it will do you no good if your competitors have better optimized sites. As a determining factor, your domain name (and your page name) remain relatively small.
A few notes on choosing a domain name: choose a domain name that stands out from the crowd and that is easy to remember. There is a reason why Google and Yahoo named themselves those names instead of ‘bestwebsitefinder.com’.
Secondly, you want to buy all the domain names that your audience might type in to find your company – e.g. if you own a website called Yeahah.co.uk, it would be wise to also buy Yeahah.com as I can guarantee you a lot of people will be typing in that address. However, I wouldn’t bother with misspellings. Ones you’ve created all your domains, simple 301-redirect them all to your main content site. If you decide to run multiple sites, a word of caution: make sure that the content on all these sites is decisively different. Google tends to suppress duplicated content and is known to penalize sites when it believes they have created multiple sites so that only their content can rank high in Google. In other words: Google allows you to run multiple sites in your industry, but only if there is enough of a reason to operate multiple sites (by offering decisively different content). Just keep in mind that running multiple sites is a lot more time- and money costly than running one site and making sure it is the best in the industry.
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Here is a comment (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/boston-pubcon-2006-day-1/#comment-22227) from Matt Cutts of Google dated April 18, 2006 on his blog:
IP delivery: delivering results to users based on IP address. Cloaking: showing different pages to users than to search engines.
IP delivery includes things like "users from Britain get sent to the co.uk, users from France get sent to the .fr". This is fine-even Google does this.
It's when you do something *special* or out-of-the-ordinary for Googlebo...
We have been told that IP delivery would be the right SEO strategy by our consultant. But when I looked this up, I found out that his suggestion is actually an illegal strategy called IP cloaking?
What should I do?...
The "best" keyword depends on the following main factors:
1.) The amount of traffic it will generate.
2.) The difficulty of attaining a top ranking.
3.) The profitability of that keyword.
In this answer I will address each point and give recommendations on tools to use to help you in your assessment.
The Amount of Traffic it Will Generate
Often people choose keywords based on how popular they think they may be. Mostly it is based on "real world" factors rather then fact which is readily availa...
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