Thread: To hyphenate or not to hyphenate....

that is the question...

I am considering creating a site www. city-homes.com because the non hyphenated version is taken. Is this effective? Do clients have a problem with using hypens?

What terms work better than homes? Should I use citybchomes?

The biggest problem comes in speaking your URL to clients. They may only remember the name and not the hyphen. In that case you are sending them to your competition. How easy would it be to type something in naturally without the hyphen, even if you meant to use the hyphen.

Originally Posted by Canadian Realtor

that is the question...

I am considering creating a site www. city-homes.com because the non hyphenated version is taken. Is this effective? Do clients have a problem with using hypens?

What terms work better than homes? Should I use citybchomes?

I personally would use my own name and brand it

But there must be an SEO advantage to using city state (province) in the domain. I am new to the area and will have a tough time branding my name, I think, plus getting the site to then rank for city state real estate.

Well there is a little bit of an advantage but IMO it is minor. If you only want to advertise online, then maybe it is the way to go since the dash seperates two very good keywords.
However I am not so sure that in the long run it will be beneficial. I always believe in getting your name out there as much as possible. You never knows who overhears your name somewhere and then decides to visit your site.

Two real questions that I see here:

1. Is there an advantage to useing a keyterm in the URL
2. What should be the name of the website

IN regard to #1, there is no real answer. You will find people out there who swear by it and those who have had success without it. However, if you are going to use a key term in the URL, the better key word would be real estate since that is typed in far more than the word homes

In regard to #2, what I always tell my clients is that it depends if you plan on either hiring people in the future or plan on selling the website when you retire. If the answer is yes, than branding it with your name would not be the best way to go in my opinion. An agent would rather have an e-mail that says joe@bchomes.com than joe@billsmith.com

Also, when coming up with a name for offline marketing, it needs to be short and easily remembered. You would never use a domain name like national-real-estate-directory.com for offline marketing.

Just my two cents.

Well put San,

I guess what I am looking to do is gather some clients from my website. I will be selling real estate part time, so, other than friends and family, it will be my only marketing.

I need it to rank well and be able to capture clients, either via forms or registration, so I will have to work on those things...

Originally Posted by Sansei

Two real questions that I see here:

1. Is there an advantage to useing a keyterm in the URL
2. What should be the name of the website

IN regard to #1, there is no real answer. You will find people out there who swear by it and those who have had success without it. However, if you are going to use a key term in the URL, the better key word would be real estate since that is typed in far more than the word homes

In regard to #2, what I always tell my clients is that it depends if you plan on either hiring people in the future or plan on selling the website when you retire. If the answer is yes, than branding it with your name would not be the best way to go in my opinion. An agent would rather have an e-mail that says joe@bchomes.com than joe@billsmith.com

Also, when coming up with a name for offline marketing, it needs to be short and easily remembered. You would never use a domain name like national-real-estate-directory.com for offline marketing.

Just my two cents.

My personal opinion is always to get a name that sounds like what it should be, and then brand it. I might be wrong about this. But I have not found the perfect solutions in the past 5 years on what to do if you want a domain and cannot have it. I personally would prefer myname.net rather than my-name-.com and then try to possibly purchase the .com later

Mike

Why dont you try CityHomesBy First name dot com. Its appealing and would be easy to remember. Plus this will give your first name branding and also meet some of the seo attributes for the SEs. Just food for thought.

cityhomesbyrod, does that sound alright?

Obviously, my city name would fall in for the 'city'