I have full or partial ownership in 3 sites right now and am very close to launching a 4th. This 4th will be my most serious attempt at bringing in money, versus just learning/having fun.

Right now the main thing holding me back is the name; I'm torn on how to format it. Both versions are available, and both have their benefits. This isn't the actual name, but basically I can go with:

www.our-history.com or www.ourhistory.com

The first is easier to read and understand as written, but it leaves the second one very open to poaching. Also, if I understand this correctly, the dashed url makes both individual words count towards SEO. Is this correct?

So, people with experience, what should I do?

I'd definitely go for the non-hyphen version. While SEO is important, google is smart enough to parse out the two words. Try searching for any 2 keywords and you'll see what google identifies in bold. In addition, if you do any further branding on radio or by word of mouth it's a lot easier to not have to worry mentioning the hyphen.

If you're concerned, I would buy both and 301 redirect our-history.com to ourhistory.com.

(301 = permanent server redirect which can be set in .htaccess)

You don't even need to do the 301 redirect. I own blackbooksingles.com and blackbooksingles.net, (both of which are hosted at GoDaddy), and GoDaddy let me set up the .net domain to automatically redirect to the .com domain...no need to understand/set up .htaccess files for a 301 redirect.

DNS doesn't know what a web browser is, nor does it care.

The only way to change the text in the address bar is via either a dummy site that redirects or have both names sit at the same IP and the website itself checks which name was used and redirects.

GoDaddy is probably just doing the dummy site redirect for you, I'd ask them.

I think you both missed the point.

Sure, you could point the other domain to the same nameserver/host, but the idea of the 301 is so that google/yahoo/etc transfer pagerank to your desired site. If other sites link to the hyphen domain, you want that to transfer.

A meta-refresh or other temporary redirects won't help.

You're probably right, I never looked into how exactly their redirect works/differs from a standard 301.

Whatever method GoDaddy performs appears to work the same as a 301, though like I said, I don't know *exactly* how it works. Try typing blackbooksingles.net into your browser, and you'll see the address bar changes into the .com domain. I never bothered to look into how GoDaddy does it, but I assume it's basically the same as nuclear500 pointed out above.

In any case, I'm not disagreeing with you, I was just trying to add an alternative to the response.

Similarly, to whoever asked the original question, you'll want to either use www or no www. In other words, if you want your visitors to come to www.example.com, then you should make example.com perform a 301 redirect to www.example.com as well.

Also, in case it's not clear, the whole reason for this is that it boosts your link juice in search engines so that you'll appear higher in the search results for incoming links...so if some external websites point to www.example.com/some-page.html, and other external websites point to example.com/some-page.html, you don't want the link juice to seem as though it goes to 2 different pages. The 301 redirect tells search engines that these are the same page, and so your link juice is combined.

I thought about doing this, I even wrote most of the code (also inspired by the plentyoffish guy) but then I decided that it would be too hard to get users... how did you get it off the ground? Did you create fake profiles? If not, why did anyone stick around on your site in the beginning?

Adsense people and SEO folk in general, what services are using to figure out search terms to optimize for?

I just launched last month, and it's been a slow process so far. Since I don't have money to invest in SEM, I'm still working on various aspects relating to SEO to try to get myself to rank higher for popular phrases like "free online dating" (so far I'm on SERP page 10 or something for Google for that phrase, which blows). Because it's not easy to find my site like many of these other dating sites, I only have about 300 members, about 175 of which have created profiles (and only 40 of them have uploaded photos).

One thing I did do that I thought would help more than it has was to create a Facebook application since the News Feed there is essentially free marketing among users' friends. Unfortunately it hasn't worked that well for me though. I think it's because I require users to register an account, even via Facebook, which results in many potential users veering away.

I think it's going to be one of those things that takes time, and I expected that from the start though.

I only use the first two, and especially the first one. (I'm cheap/broke, so I can't afford to pay for WordTracker's full service, otherwise I'd consider it.) I've also heard good things about the third one listed here, though I haven't tried it.

• freekeywords.wordtracker.com
• adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
• tools.seobook.com/keyword-tools/seobook/

good thread thanks maxtower

Excellent thread, lots of good info.

I just wanted to add that I built and have owned an adult "celebrity" site since September of 2000. Adult sites can be extremely lucrative and once established require very very little time to keep earning income. A good resource if anyone is interested is http://www.gfy.com. There is a marketplace there with sites for sale.

Nice thread. Slightly OT...

In the past I've taken sites that seem to work well for the English speaking world & developed Japanese versions. However, I've been overly ambitious & though I've successfully built the sites I really haven't been able to market them. An example was a Japanese version of rentacoder.com which never got off the ground because I was unable to create the necessary marketplace to make it viable. However, there are a lot of Japanese (.jp or .co.jp) names available & I think something simpler that uses google adsense program might work. Does anyone have any suggestions for something that is doing good business & might translate well?

I did a **** load of research on running an adult site about 2 years ago when I was living in Delaware. Unfortunately, after I learned a bunch about it, I found out that there is a state law in DE that would prevent me from legally running it, so I dropped the idea at the time. I still have the textfile with all my notes on my other PC, I should look into it again now that I moved...

Either buy both or just get the non-hyphenated one.