Hi everyone,

I have 90% finished my new site www.wildlifeart-online.com and would really like to hear everyones suggestions and opinions, especially regarding Google SEO. This site will take over from my current site www.onlineartdemos.co.uk and concentrate solely on paintings and prints.

My main concern is for the homepage to place well on Google for the search term "Wildlife art" and although Google has the new site listed already the Rank is still zero - probably as it is so new? about 1 month or less?

Or am I making mistakes on the new site already, that I seemed to fumble better on the old one (that one does pretty good for the "Wildlife Art" term).

I would REALLY appreciate any help anyone can give me as I'd love to make this new site a sucess or at the very least give it my best shot.

Well first I like the look of the new site better. I'm assuming the new domain is to take advantgae of the wildfileart part for rank. Sadly it's not going to make a difference for a couple of reasons. The domain really isn't going to have much of an impact on where you rank, but even if it did search engines will see wildlifeart as one word. It won't match for wildlife or art.

However I do like the new domain better better since I think it better describes the site.

I do think you're right in that the site being so new is why you're not seeing any search presence. I wouldn't worry about the PR it's showing though since it's not why you rank where you do and the PR you see in the toolbar isn't the PR Google uses behind the scenes.

What you can do to help the new site once it's finished is to keep the old domain and use permanent (301) rediects to point urls from the old site to the new site. I'd try to match the old urls to the url that comes closest in content on the new site. If there are any that don't really match you can redirect those to the home page of the new site.

The 301 should transfer any seo gains from the old site to the new, however you'll want to keep ownership of the old domain for awhile since you'll be setting up the redirects on the old domain. At least keep it until you've managed to build up enough for the new site where it doesn't need the assistance of the old one.

Thanks Vangogh,

Brilliant suggestion, when I add some more content I will do that for sure.

Shame about the domain name, but it does look a bit more professional and the ones I really wanted were already gone as usual.

Any more ideas from anyone?

I do like the new domain name better. wildlife-art.com or wildlife-art-online.com would have a slight benefit in terms of seo, but still not much and it's generally not worth it to purchase a domain for seo reasons alone.

If you want to get some benefit out of the url you can name folders and files with keywords. You don't want to overdo it though.

And I definitely like the new site better than the old one. It's looking good.

Originally Posted by vangogh

The domain really isn't going to have much of an impact on where you rank, but even if it did search engines will see wildlifeart as one word. It won't match for wildlife or art.

I do not agree with this part of your message. I choosed a random combination of two words -car wash and see the results on google search:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&l...sh&btnG=Search

I can notice that the whole domain names with word carwash (without dash) are marked bold as well as word car-wash (with dash).

I think the domain name wildlifeart-online will have similar positive effect as would wildlife-art-online or wild-life-art-online have.

I've seen the bold too and perhaps you may be right, but everything I've heard and read from those who know more than I do indicated they don't see the separate words in the domain when ranking the sites. Perhaps that knowledge is out of date though.

Either way your domain doesn't play a big part in where you rank. It possibly is a ranking factor, but any benefit is minor. There are better reasons to choose a domain and you can always add keywords in the url, by naming files and folders with them.

The idea of whether Google is going to see wildlifeart and wildlife-art as the same is interesting though. I've seen it debated a lot and always came away from the debates thinking they don't see them the same way. It seems silly though since they do use stemming and there's no reason why they shouldn't be able to.

Of course there's no reason why they can't figure out that domain.com and www.domain.com are the same domain, but Google sees them as two different domains.

Here's a post from Matt Cutts discussing underscores and dashes. The post is almost a year old so things may have changed, but as far as I know they are still the same now.

The rationale behind not using the underscore is because it's seen as one word instead of two. I realize we're talking about something a little different, but if you wouldn't want word1_word2 because it won't be seen as word1 word2, I would think the same would apply to word1word2.

I think the technology behind the syntax highlight that bolds words in the results is different from the technology used in choosing where to rank a page based on the url.

I don't know why it should be, but that's been my interpretation of things for awhile.