For a new domain it's VERY important. For ours, we found a domain name that's 11 years old, and related to our keywords but not exact(www.horseswest.com with keyword dressage saddles) and that's worked out really well so far.

Nice site. I think you'll do well with it. Is that your 1877 number or is that the dropshipper?

thanks Eihli. That 877 number forwards to me , my wife, and/or my partner. My wife is the saddle expert fwiw.

i've wondered that before, dont know answer though

Its important because you will get a much better google pagerank position and get a better SEO(Search Engine Optimization). But if you wanna start a new brand you can forget about the keywords on your domain name because its not worth and you can get a nice SEO without the keywords on the domain too.

Here's a business idea for you...

Sitepoint which has been one of the better places to purchase websites on the internet recently started trying to move their marketplace traffic to flippa.com. The annoying thing about this move is that they changed their fee structure to now take a percentage of sales. They are taking a 5% cut which is just ridiculous. I don't think ebay even takes this much. They used to charge $20 for a listing which is pretty reasonable. A lot of sites sell for over $1000, with the largest ones selling for 6 figures.

Why don't one of you launch a similar site and go back to charging reasonable rates for sales?

Lets say im gonna open a fan site for a band with the name example. What would be a good domain name that covers that its booth a forum and news site for that band? I mean I could have www.exampleforum.com, but I would want the domainname to reflect that its more then just a forum.

everythingnsync.com

unless you just point the domain to blogger.com and just re-route in advanced settings on blogger it so everything is hosted free. ; )

unless you just point the domain to your free blog on blogger.com and just re-route in advanced settings on blogger it so everything is hosted free with html and javascript. ; )

or you could just use the html and javascript in a blogger.com blog for free and point the domain to the blogger site in blogger's advanced settings. free hosting. ; )

sorry about those double posts. Either my browser or this site was extremely slow posting those. I didn't think they got through.

Very true. Right on about the links from authority sites to. I've made some decent part time income from my blog hosted on blogger.com with the domain just pointed to it. Google loves blogs because G (google) loves new content and content from authority.

Any thoughts on link units vs direct ads for optimization? Or perhaps I should do a combo of both?

These are going on a long single page website.

What exactly do you mean by link unit vs. Direct ads? Do you mean adsense text ads, text-link-ads, or direct ads you sell yourself directly to advertisers? I run a mix of ad types on my sites. I would go with one/some of each rather than a lot of one type.

great thread...just came across it...and tks for the bump ... question regarding buying and selling a site: what are the best places to find these sites? I know you mentioned sitepoint.com (any subsection on that site?)...and are there any other sources for finding websites for sale?

I'm curious about this as well. I think Sitepoint's marketplace for website was moved to Flippa. But having more auctions to browse is always good, assuming that the sellers are legitimate.

I've had a Site Build It site for about 3 years. It's in the dietary supplements niche with maybe 100 pages of content. I researched and wrote all the content myself. I don't work on it everyday, in fact, I often ignore it completely for months at a time.

I didn't take keyword research seriously when I first started building content pages. Big mistake! I created pages with keywords that seemed good but in reality had too much competition---even years later I'm still not on the first page in Google results. As a rule, you should have a profitable keyword picked out before you build a page. These days, I wouldn't build a page unless I know I can easily get on page 1.

Boring as it is, I'm going back and replacing most of those keywords with less competitive ones. If you're gonna build an authority content site, start out dominating the low traffic/low competition keywords first. Someone very successful in building natural health websites actually told me this before I started and I didn't listen to him.

Maybe this is a dumb question, but how possible is it these days to come up with keywords that get you on a Google search pg. 1 without it being ultra-specific (like someone Googling the exact name of your website)?

I've done a lot of domain squatting over the past year or so. There seems to be a lot of newbies trying to sell domains on Godaddy.com. I've sold only one domain on godaddy so far. I'm getting frustrated with trying to sell on there. I have a Sedo.com account and will probably try and sell with them. They are a large domain marketplace. I know of someone who sold a domain on there with some success. I just need to find a site with more professionals....

you dont go after the big keywords... targeted micro keywords are where the money is at nowadays. USe adwords keyword tool, plug in a generic keyword and market to the different variations it comes up with. You want high volume search, relatively small search results and little ad competition.

Going after the big terms like "work at home" or "make money online" are so oversaturated that getting into them is a waste of time. Look for keywords that the people spending $10k+ a day on adwords arent targeting. Instead of "work at home" maybe try "home, working online" much less search activity, but the competition's less (just an example I didnt look this one up)

its all about creativity and originality in your content.

imo using punctuation to focus on weird search terms like this is a hot way to use adsense right now.

Thanks - that makes sense. I don't even have a website right now, but I have some ideas in the works, so I will keep this in mind.

Can you guys point me to some decent graphics forums (or similar) where I can request to have some logos/banners made?

the site 99designs.com is pretty cool.

digitalpoint

There are many vendors on that site who do great work for reasonable prices.