We have written a number of articles about the Keyword Loaded Domain Name Location Advantage or a fun but true little story about the Domain Name Secret and you may want to have a read of those. So here it is probably more important to discuss more of the cons than the pros. To be honest the cons are really more from misguided application of keyword loaded domains and not so much that they have problems per se!

There was a time where eager Internet marketers brought up keyword loaded domains seperated by hyphens to trick search engines into giving them higher serch results.  They looked something like this www.Buy-Keyword-Loaded-Domain-Names-From-Me.com and the reason they did this was at that stage in early search engines, keywords were not read well if they were not separated. This is no longer the case and in fact the search engines will likely penalise a site if it has more than a couple of hyphens in due to the high probability it is a spam style site.

If you watch videos or read the blog by Matt Cutts of Google; he repeats quite frequently the use of a few Keywords in your URL's. In other words when you build a page for your website he suggests the URL you use describes the content of the page. The article you are reading has the URL /keyword-domain-names-pros-and-cons this is a little long really and i would suggest up to 4 is better. The reason I break my guidelines here is it reads nicely as a sentence and does not look spammy. I haven't tried to stuff heaps of keywords into the URL!

So what about the actual domain then?

Well search engines have improved their ability to decipher words from domains without the need for hyphens [-] and from an investment or value stand point owning a domain name without a hyphen is definitely more desirable. Also if you are going to market your domain name offline in print media or radio/television then a domain without a hyphen and memorable keywords is going to be easier to remember. But the truth is Google and most major search engines just call the hyphen a space and the accepted opinion is it should rate just as well as the non hyphen version. TLD personally keeps away from domains with hyphens apart from very high quality premium domain names like:

• Car-Hire.co.nz
• Rental-Cars.co.nz
• Real-Estate.co.nz

With the above domains; if we are relying on Internet traffic and Organic (free) search results; then they will be every bit as good as their non hyphen equivalents given that we build a good quality content rich website!
It really is hard to come up with many "Cons" for keyword domains (IMO), the more your domain describes your business the better really, like the above three. You need to think about what a person will type into Google and if that makes sense as a short-ish domain name then buy it!!! Your keyword domain does not need to describe your entire business and we have written articles about niche marketing using MiniSites or Mini Websites that cover this very powerful application.

We can help your business grow online so drop us an email and lets look at your options.