Thread: [ask] URL SEO importance?

Say you find a low competition micro niche, revolving around a product, but the .COM/.ORG/.NET are taken (which is extremely common for product related 600+ exact searches per month)

In anyone's experience, is it worth it to pursue the micro niche?

And if so, would you change the URL to a related keyword or would you change the extension (.biz,.us,etc...)? Or would you go with .COM/.ORG/.NET with a different keyword density? What are the pros and cons, and what is the overall importance?

For example, keyword "micro hot product,"

microhotproduct.com/net/org is taken, so:

emicrohotproduct.com

vs

microhotproduct.biz

vs (related keyword with 1/2 or less traffic)

bestmicrohotproduct.com

OR, would you just move on to another niche that you can grab the .COM/.ORG/.NET for

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Any help would be greatly appreciated

emicrohotproduct.com wins !

Go for niche keyword if it's a selling one otherwise, might not be worth it.

Agree with unzero. You want to dot com with the keyiword and add something at the beginning or end of it.

Ah, so .com no matter what. Now my question is; are you saying it should be the highest keyword density possible, with the inclusion of google stop words? Or what about a related keyword as your URL that happens to include your main keyword? Like product.com versus bestproduct.com

If you can get the dead-on .net, then that's the second best after the dead-on dot com.

After that, I prefer a word at the end rather than at the beginning. As far as stop word or other words, I like a word that is short. I like stop words, but I might go with a longer word and/or not a stop word if the word is a "buying" word. A related keyword can be really good especially if is is a buying keyword. I've seen high ranked sites for all these different combinations. To figure out what is best will depend on your niche to some extent. SEO is part art, part science and part guessing, since no one knows for sure what uncle G00gle will do or change.

followup...

Here is the order of importance I use:

1. keywordphrase.com
2. keywordphrase.net
3. keyword-phrase.com
4. keywordphrase++.com
5. ++keywordphrase.com

As far as the ++ (extra word), look at commercial intent and related keywords or stop words. for example, "product" may be better than "tips" because "tips" is someone more likely looking for information and not to buy.

Thanks so much! What's your thoughts on .org? I mean, will google actually punish you for promoting on the .org extension?

Here is my opinion:

Code:

Preference 1 - www.YourKeywords.com
Preference 2 - www.YourKeywords.org
Preference 3 - www.YourKeywords.net
Preference 4 - www.Your-Keywords.com
Preference 5 - www.Your-Keywords.org
Preference 6 - www.Your-Keywords.net

There are so many ways to tackle this, but Matt Cutts of Google has come out and emphatically stated that TLD does not matter at all when it comes to ranking a site. If your primary intention is to just rank the site and you do not have any plans to flip/sell it later, then I'd take any TLD that was available which offered an exact match..

Oh, wow; I've been totally oblivious in regards to hyphens. I had no idea that a hyphenated URL would beat out connected keyphrases w/ different extensions (biz,co,us,info,etc...) How does Google handle hyphens in the URL; anything else I should know?