It has been proven that having keywords in your domain can dramatically increase your rankings in some search engines.

I don't recommend doing this example below for your main site, however, I think it is a great idea for doorway pages...

Many good, short two word keyword domains are taken (with and without dashes.

Here's how to get beat the system:

Domains with 2 dashes in them!

Decide what your two-word keyword or phrase
would be. (For this to work, it must be a two-word search phrase.) In this example, it's "buy games".

Most search engines completely ignore the hyphens for the purpose of examining key word usage (and key-word relevance) within the URL, so you'll still get considerable attention using these URLs."

The advantage of this is that you can now get a short url that
slips through the long url filters AND which "flies under the radar"
of the "blank space" filters - since it only contains (as far as
the search engines are concerned) "one" block of blank space.

Ex. buy-games.com is taken
buy--games.com is not

As well, a number of VERY popular short two keyword combinations are still available with 2 dashes. I bought a couple myself and will let you know how it goes. I will be setting them up as optimized doorway pages with a link to my main site.

Any thoughts?

Using dashes in the URL may make it look better... but if you are trying to promote a URL by word of mouth, then I'd recommend a backup that does not have dashes if you can get hold of one...

I think this is one of the reasons why I prefer to use my info domain over my com (websiteowner.info and website-owner.com both go to the same IP). Now I have my .info, I just blurt out the name without having to specify where the dashes are, there aren't any... with my .com, I'd have to be specific, and then there is the issue of "is it website or web site"?

IMO two dashes will only cause confusion if you ever have to say the domain... not sure how the engines will view it... I've never seen any url with two dashs so close. Perhaps there is a reason for this?

Hi Tiggy,

I would not use a two dash (--) domain for my main site either. This example is just to be used for doorways pages...

You don't see it much because the idea has been overlooked, but I'll see if I can find you some examples...

How about some more info on doorway pages? Anyone using them now or planning on using them?

Some questions:[list=1][*]Hosted where? Free hosts?[*]What type of domain names used? .com .net .biz etc. ?[*]Do you use redirects with them?[*]Do you use actual text with the keywords? Or do you use "alphabet soup"?[*]How many links back to main site?[/list=1]

Dave