SEO Tips - Domain & URL Tricks When Someone Already Beat You To It

It has long been thought that keywords in your URL strings on a site are weighted in search engine rankings, and the majority of practising SEOs agree that keyworded domains carry a fair boost in the rankings, for those keywords.

Whether or not, and to what levels this is true in both instances is up for debate, but for the sake of this hub we are going to assume that you want to have the tidiest and best possible URLs or domain name for SEO reasons, and so after painstaking research settle on a choice, only to find someone already beat you to it.

Hopefully a couple of observations we've seen lately on our extensive web travels, may help next time you want to publish a hub with an exact URL that is already taken, or indeed purchase a domain name that is already taken. So apologies for stringing the length of this hub out, but you know Hub Author score - Hub Scores and all that - but it's actually pretty simple stuff, and so cant be strung out too long..

Hubpages is a very large and thriving community, with lots of creative and SEO literate members, so there is usually a good chance that whatever your brainwave idea, somebody already beat you to it, and often with the exact URL you wanted. Sound familiar?

Ok so take a look at the two Hub URLs below, not much difference there, is there?

http://hubpages.com/hub/Small-Business-SEO

http://hubpages.com/hub/Small-Business-SEO-

But enough, for Google anyway. Believe it or not, the " - " on the end of the second URL means that is a totally different page, the first choice was taken and used previously, but now is no longer published, but nor is it available, the second is a different hub entirely.

You probably also noticed your (or other's) user profiles also use the "+ " instead of hyphens? But how many people think to use:

Make+Money+Online as a URL when Make-Money-Online is taken?

- There's nothing stopping you, Google are every bit as comfortable ranking keyword+keyword instead of keyword-keyword.

In a private pro SEO forum we belong to, a senior member recently advanced the possible theory that "+" may even be better than "-" because after all, when you search Google for "Rubber boots" once the search is done, if you look in your browser URL string, you will see:

http://www.google.com/search?q=rubber+boots&pws=0&hl=en&num=10

We have seen no evidence of this being the case yet, but we haven't really been looking either.

What we do know is that our profile page hubpages.com/profile/SEO+Ibiza is quite happy on the first page for "SEO Ibiza" above certain other notable parties who are trying really hard to get past #8, so it doesn't seem to carry any rankings disadvantages.

Some people spend literally hundreds of hours researching keywords, niches and domains, only to try their keyword choice and it's not available, so you try the keywords with hyphens, and they're also gone.

There's another little tip that we've seen in a certain highly competitive niche recently that will spread like wildfire again once everybody cottons on and realises that just about every keyword combo they might want is actually still possible.

Again, we have seen these domains already present on page one and page two of Google for their keywords, so there is no doubt they are capable of ranking just the same as if you had the first choices.

And lets pick a very competitive area, "make money online"

of course makemoneyonline.com and all favourable variations are already gone, along with make-money-online.com, and all it's variations,

"so of course there's np point even looking at the ones I'd really like, makemoney or make-money they're all bound to be in the same position?

No, again, use an extra " - " making 2 hyphens between the keywords, and domain buying is suddenly a very much easier game.

Hopefully some of you won't have seen or been aware of the sneaky " - " until now and might find this useful in your endeavours, good luck and have fun.