What do you think of my new domain?

[Y0yOy0]

Hi guys!
I've just registered the domain "beauty-tips.org".
I think I have been lucky to find it and just wanted to know your opinions on that.

 

[Linda Buquet]

Score - congrats!

 

[DonnieSEO]

I might be wrong here but the use of hash tags within a domain is not a good thing. And .org is not as beneficial as .com

 

[djbaxter]

I might be wrong here but the use of hash tags within a domain is not a good thing. And .org is not as beneficial as .com

I have to disagree.

If you mean domains with a dash/hyphen, that's not a negative factor at all, and in some cases may even be a positive from an SEO standpoint (the dash/hyphen is a word separator which may help search engines to parse the keyword phrase). If there's a downside at all, it may be that visitors who don't bookmark may forget the hyphen when they want to return.

As for the .org TLD, again it's not a negative at all from an SEO standpoint. There are some indications that some of the newer TLDs like .info and .me may be "discounted" by search engines since they are often used as throw-away domains by spammers, but generally speaking search engines don't care about the TLD and I have seen multiple examples of .org keyword domains outranking the equivalent .com domains.

 

[DonnieSEO]

Kind of an old post.. Check out 3 and 10 12 Rules for Choosing the Right Domain Name - Picking the Best Website Name for SEO - Including Hyphens or Not and Choosing .com versus .org Domains - SEO Tips from Rand Fishkin | SEOmoz

 

[djbaxter]

Well yes, it IS old (2007) and pretty much all of the cautions in that article are about memorability, branding, etc., not SEO.

Rand's reasons for avoiding dashes are memorability for giving out your domain verbally (is it really harder to say "beauty dash tips dot org" than "beautytips all one word dot org"?) or for manual type-ins:

Reject Hyphens and Numbers
Both hyphens and numbers make it hard to give your domain name verbally and falls down on being easy to remember or type. I'd suggest not using spelled-out or roman numerals in domains, as both can be confusing and mistaken for the other.

His reasons for only using dot com domains are also debatable: yes, the dot com domain is recognized as a sort of standard but there are fewer and fewer dot com domains available today than in 2007 and there are many good reasons for NOT using dot com addresses today (e.g., regional domains). Which is better really? poor-keyword-domain.com? or good-keyword.org or good-keyword.net?

Only Choose Dot-Com Available Domains
If you're not concerned with type-in traffic, branding or name recognition, you don't need to worry about this one. However, if you're at all serious about building a successful website over the long-term, you should be worried about all of these elements, and while directing traffic to a .net or .org (as SEOmoz does) is fine, owning and 301'ing the .com is critical. With the exception of the very tech-savvy, most people who use the web still make the automatic assumption that .com is all that's out there - don't make the mistake of locking out or losing traffic to these folks.

 

[djbaxter]

See:

Should I use underscores or hyphens in URLs? - YouTube (2009)

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Q3SFVfDIS5k" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Underscores vs. dashes in URLs - YouTube (2011)

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/AQcSFsQyct8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Regarding TLDs, from 2012:

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/ldFPcJZulXQ" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>