Url with hypen or.co?

[joechicago]

Given a choice, for your #1 keyword, would you pick a .com with one or two hypens? (chicago-real-estate.com) or a .co with the full name as the url (chicagorealestate.co)?

Is there an accepted best practice regarding hypenated urls and/or decent results regarding the effectiveness of the.co?

Thank you in advance!

[wissamdandan]

Hi Joe,

I wont go after 2 hyphens, usually if the .com is not available i go after a .net.

But in your case, i would go with a .co

[tgraham]

According to the book The Art of SEO, my personal SEO bible, if you're not concerned with type-in-traffic, branding or name recognition, you don't need to worry about this. However to build a successful website long term you need to own the .com address and if you then want to use .co then the .com should redirect to it. According to the book, with the exception of the geeky, most people who use the web still assume that .com is all that's available or these are the domains that are most trustworthy.  So don't lose traffic by having another address!

[joechicago]

Thanks! I figured two hyphens wouldn't be a good idea but it's sure tempting.

[joechicago]

Thanks for your reply.

[moldybacon]

I don't like hyphens, but I don't like foreign domain extensions even more (Columbia!) despite what they say about it meaning "company", no, no. They pulled the same stunt with .me it's not on.

It depends how competitive the niche is and how much you want it. I have a feeling EMD won't be as strong in the coming months for long tail searches like this, but for now I guess it will give you the edge, what I'm trying to say is if you don't like the domain don't go with it, follow what you feel is most logical, as that is probably best for long term SEO success.The EMD benefit is nowhere near the same (in my exp) with hyphenated or foreign domains, don't get me wrong they are a benefit, but a .com, .org or net will always outrank (for now).

So in response to your question, If I was you I would buy them both (so comp. can't steal em' later), make them both blogs and get a nice brand-able domain for your business, use the two blogs as feeders for your business.

[TellThemEverything]

I would pick hypenated over anything but .com. I would nt even use .net - .org is the only one I would consider for a true non-profit organisation.

I have some hyphenated domains for ecommerce websites, and have found no big problem with them personally.  Of course go with non-hyphenated .com's if you can!

[CPU]

I agree with James and would aim for one hyphen on the .com TLD. I did some unscientific user testing in this area and one hyphen was fine, 2 or more was a turn off for the user.

The same users expected a site to be .co.uk (I'm in the UK) or .com and some were confused by the existence of different TLD's wondering where the .co.uk or .com was and thinking the URL might not work without them.

[Goetzman]

This post is deleted!

[CPU]

Completely disagree with you Korgo the average user doesn't even know there is a .co TLD that exists.

They have been available for a while, I spend a lot of time online through work and play and have never seen a site using one so not sure why you think they will take off if they haven't already despite virtually ever domain seller pushing them heavily last year.

[tgraham]

This link might help as well...

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/110316-150000

[Goetzman]

They had an ad in the superbowl, I've heard from 5 different clients about if they should buy the .co after that.

[joechicago]

Trust me when I say that I didn't think of the .co because of the Super Bowl ad.  I have heard mixed results on the .co but really haven't seen it in search results but I dont see to many hyphenated urls either. Maybe I will just add a word to the .com?

[sly-grrr]

At the risk of getting a bunch of thumbs down, between the choices you have specifically asked, I am going to throw in with the .co.

I think the issue is going to be how you promote the site, where you host it and where you get your links from.

If you host it in the USA and build a solid local link building campaign no one is going to have any trouble figuring out where you should be relevant. least of all the major search engines.

The other concern would be when someone tries to type in your url directly. However, There will be a tendency to automatically add an "m" to the end. But will that be any more of a problem then trying to get people to put a hyphen in the right place?

If people really find your site helpful, they'll just bookmark it in my experience.

[joechicago]

Thanks for the feedback.  Thats the beauty of SEO. The only way to figure out what is the most effective is to try multiple ways and measure. Then, as soon as you get it and have a conclusion, the rules change...

[andresgmontero]

Hi Joe, this is for sure an awesome question, so many different point of views, the problem I see with .co is this one:

"Sites with country-coded top-level domains (such as .ie) are already associated with a geographic region, in this case Ireland. In this case, you won't be able to specify a geographic location."

Source: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=62399

So if I understand this correctly, and you want to target real estate clients in the Chicago area (which I love and will be there for the U2 concert on July 4th) and over US/worldwide, a .co domain is probably not the way to go here.

There has been a lot of talk about .co (TLD for Colombia), same as .ws, supposedly "WebSite", actually West Samoa, so I would advice to make the obvious, look at your competitors, does anyone has a .co domain and are ranking in Chicago? are any of the top 100 results anything but .com? try different keywords just to check if there are any .co sites ranking in the real estate market.

Hope that helps!