Suppose I'm a private individual and I want to set up a site that sells modems to people in the UK. After having done some keyword research, I find that "modems for sale" is a highly searched-for term. Also, we can pretend that modemsforsale.co.uk and modems-for-sale.co.uk have been taken (neither are owned by businesses with the same name).

My dilemma is that I don't know which of the following to choose:

1. Do I choose a domain name like "modems-sale.co.uk" that matches the "modems for sale" keyword almost exactly? (Google [and others?] seem to ignore the "for" as it's a common word). Although this might help with ranking, it could get confused with the other similar sites and it's also not an easy-to-remember name.

2. Should I rather choose something that is easier to remember, like "buyamodem.co.uk", but might not help me to rank as well?

For whichever one I chose, I'd make sure that the phrase "modems for sale" would be included an acceptable amount of times across my site amongst 'h1', 'b' and other tags.

Which should I go for: #1 or #2?

All replies are appreciated.

Depends on what you want really. Either of them are very marketable for modems and if your website it SEOed well enough and is popular then you are likely to get high rankings in google anyway!

b tags? Google doesn't care about the appearance of your site. And your domain pales in comparison to real SEO, so I just really wouldn't worry about it.

Even though keywords in the URL are taken in account as a ranking factor, it has a low value to SE. So I wouldn't worry much about it. Just try to follow simple rules for choosing a domain name, check this article that will give you information to great resources about domain names:

Best Practices when getting a domain name

Hope this helps.


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Link edited to point to ORIGINAL </edit>

Lots of good advice here regarding domain name selection. Don't consider it part of your SEO, think of it as part of your marketing. Choose a name that will be easy for your visitors to remember. "Amazon.com" is taken but it's easy to remember. How about "modemmonster"

Yeh, I think I'll be less paranoid about getting the perfect domain name. Thanks for all the contributions.

Domain name should be small and it should have meaning.

It should be incorporated with kewords. Keywords it matters on SEO basis.

if you serious with it pick domain for your visitor not for SE