2 replies to this topic

[joesc230]

Hi everyone,

My family's business is in the travel industry. We have a very successful non-web business and just did a full redesign of our website. The new design is very good, we just don't have much traffic going in yet. The current page rank is 4, which I understand isn't horrible considering we haven't focused on the web at all. Now that the redesign is done I've been looking into ways to increase our traffic and of course our business.

A recent idea I had was to buy domain names that matched the exact phrases that I'd want to optimize our site for. I just am not sure what the best thing to do is from there. Should I buy these domains and have them automatically forward a user to my existing website...or do I make a landing page for that particular subject which would have links to my existing site? Or is neither a good idea?

My main idea behind this is to get our site to show up very high on search for the terms I'm interested in, since the site itself would be those exact keywords. Am I missing something here?

Thanks for any help/advice!!

Basically I found A LOT of domains that are not owned yet that I would find very valuable as far as keywords relative to my site goes - is there a "best" way to use such sites?

[torka]

In my experience, the domain name carries very little weight all by itself in terms of SEO. So simply pointing these domains to your existing site isn't going to do you any real good.

If you want to use these domain names, you'll have to spend many, many additional hours trying to build links for them in order for them to benefit your site by linking to it. Without links pointing to them, those domains will have no "link juice" to pass along in the first place.

And the only way you're going to get valuable links pointing at these domains is if they offer valuable, link-worthy content. So be prepared to spend even more additional hours developing worthwhile content. If all you're talking about doing is building a one-page "landing page" site on each domain, essentially what you're talking about is "doorway pages" and it's one of the oldest (and lamest) tricks in the book. Not recommended.

If they're really strongly keyword-relevant, it's possible they might generate some type-in traffic. If you think that's the case, then simply point them to the relevant page on your existing site with a 301 redirect.

Frankly, either way you're going to incur unnecessary expense and time, IMO. If it were me, I'd invest my time and energy in building up the existing site content and links, and forget about amassing a collection of "keyword rich" domains.

My YMMV.

--Torka

[Jill]

Or is neither a good idea?

Bingo!

You'll want to read our numerous topics here on additional domain names for more. I believe we have lots, plus there are many articles from the newsletter on the topic as well.

I'm gonna close this one...