A friend has a question about buying and using a domain

[webgurucreative]

My friend is starting a yoga site and needed advice about how to use the domains.

BikramYogaSantaClarita.com and BikramSCV.com are the 2 domains.

The DBA is Bikram Yoga Santa Clarita. This was her message to me:

The person I spoke with at GoDaddy suggested using the DBA name as the website and on advertising and the shorter one for email addresses, as it’s easier to say and write down, and also have the shorter one point to the longer DBA one. What do you think?

What are your thoughts?

[DennisSeymour]

Hi

It's true that there is nothing really wrong with it and that it will be hard to remember but she can always use other emails and forward to another email address.

I think using another domain is somewhat of a waste if it's "just" for email.

If she has the time, then she can use that extra domain as a separate lead generator, maybe as a blog/landing page (and can also be used for links to the main site) - At least it's not just for emails.

If you meant to ask about which domain to use primarily, nowadays, keyword domains like BikramYogaSantaClarita.com are usually "frowned" upon due to one of Google's recent updates so they normally recommend using the brand name... but it actually still works great.

Slap on some good content, send it some good links and it'll rank easily.

[webgurucreative]

Thank you!  I'll pass it along.

[David-Kley]

There are a lot of factors to this. It falls into the famous "it depends" seo answer

1. Do you want the email address to appear more professional? If not, then just get a gmail address that is easier to manage and troubleshoot that a server controlled email. I'm sure you could find something like BikramSCV@gmail.com available.

2. Do people (and Google) associate the abbreviation "SCV" with the local area? Doing a few searches in Google should let you know this very quickly. If so, then use the shorter domain. If not, then the longer domain since it includes the "yoga" and "santa clarita" keywords. You could at this point use the other domain for email, if the professional appearance is important to you. I did a few searches in Google for you, and it appears that they do not put the two together, and it shows different results for each phrase. BUT, that does not mean that users don't associate them together. Try and think of how your site will be searched for, and make your domain choice accordingly.

You could also spend a few moments looking up other domains, just to see what is catchy, and available.