Making use of a good domain name

[Coppock]

Hi everyone,
I was just wondering - if you have your site on a domain, and have another domain purchased utilising great keywords what would you recommend the best course of action for SEO?
I had one pointing as a redirect, but the domain didn't gather any ranking?

Would setting up a holding page to target that particular searcher with a link to the existing site be the best method? So it would be like a one page advert for the main site?

Thanks
Jen

[david64]

Hi everyone,
I was just wondering - if you have your site on a domain, and have another domain purchased utilising great keywords what would you recommend the best course of action for SEO?
I had one pointing as a redirect, but the domain didn't gather any ranking?

Would setting up a holding page to target that particular searcher with a link to the existing site be the best method? So it would be like a one page advert for the main site?

What you are describing sounds like a doorway page to me. If Google find that, chances are they will remove it from their serch results. Its what would be called web spam.

If you are talking about getting a keywrd rich domain like webdesignshrewsbury.biz for a web designer in Shrewsbury you will need to put a legitimite site on it.

Basically, if you are putting any type of site up that is just or largely to manipulate Google, that site will risk getting whacked.

[I, Brian]

It depends - a great keyword domain should look natural, ie homeinsurance.co.uk as opposed to apply-cheap-home-insurance-deals-uk.co.uk.

Also, be warned that Google does treat single page websites differently to multi-page websites, so any second site you may want to promote should really have multiple pages for SEO purposes.

A question, really - if the domain name is so great, why aren't you considering branding on that? Or is the domain not right in some way?

[Coppock]

A question, really - if the domain name is so great, why aren't you considering branding on that? Or is the domain not right in some way?

Hi, in truth I've got a couple of domains, one was using the area I used to live in and since i've moved but still offer work in that area it seems to make more sense to use my existing business domain.

The other is a popular search term, but I was going to direct it to a friends site who has it hosted elsewhere... if that makes any sense?

If you think the search engines won't be happy about it do you have a technical term I can read up on for it?
thanks
Jen

[TheSlackers]

As long as you build a decent site on the domain the search engines will be fine about it. Just don't rely on the domain to do all the work for you. Redirecting is often pointless as there is no site for the engines to index ,which is probably why you got no rankings. There is no site, it's just a pointer to another page.

You can look up "doorway" or "gateway" pages for things to avoid.