Some beginer questions

I have being reading various blogs/websites about SEO and I wrote down a few questions as I was going along. Hope that somebody can help me out

1. when using keywords in a domain will it make a difference if they are all put together. For example lets say kungfuinmanchester.extension would that be treated as a single word? Would kungfu-in-manchester.extension be a better domain to purchase?

2. Are CMS a good idea in terms of SEO? Most of the ones I have used seem to follow the same pattern of having pages with multiple articles on the page, but you can click something like "read more" for another page with individual articles - that where already on another page group with other articles.
Does this count as repeated content and is it a problem?

3. Will using services like socialmarker actually help or just cause problems? It has a lot of sites listed is it just spamming links?

With a small localised business, sticking with the previous example, lets say kung fu classes in Manchester. Should I be submitting content to sites like digg etc... even with the content not being useful to an international audience? Or is that the point, that I should be making content that's useful to an international audience?

many thanks

Going popular opinion here, hope you don't mind.

keywords all together is probably best. dashes are perceived by many as weaker, or second best choice. kungfumanchester.co.uk would be my choice first choice for targeting that term (is it taken?). kungfuinmanchester is more the route of:

kungfuinsidemanchester.ext
kungfuaroundmanchester..ext
kungfunearmanchester..ext

CMSs are a good idea for SEO, CMS like wordpress makes it easy to structure your site, tag your posts and get good page titles and urls.

The read more is not duplicate content. With most CMSs these days you dont have to worry about duplicate content, and these days (with so many dupe content still around) Google will likely opt to ignore duplicate content, instead of penalizing you for "good intent, bad implementation".

For ranking, no not directly. For getting your word out: depends if you can write content that survives on social networks. If you can write kick-*** kung fu content like: 10 Bruce Lee Kicks with Video, What to do in a barfight? or Fighting of attackers for women, im sure you will get some links to your website.


The trick is to not write about kung fu classes in manchester, but to host some content that survives on digg. Also write some articles about the history of kung fu, do you know if TigerClaw! is a real move? and the skills your masters. If I was in Manchester and searching information about kung fu, I'm not directly interested in joining your classes -- not a 100% targetted visitor, but after I saw your website and offer to train in a gym nearby, I might be...

To go along with what Jesus said, kungfumanchester.co.uk would be the best pick, although it is currently taken. Google is smart enough to know that the domain webdesigncompany.com contains 3 words.

Generally you want to avoid prepositions in the domain unless they are part of the brand name.

While hyphenated URLs are not penalized or disfavored by Google, I believe it severely inhibits word of mouth marketing, which will be essential to your business since it has local constraints.

Imagine this scenario, which I believe you would run into quite often

Prospect: "What's your website?"
You: "Kungfumanchester.co.uk, but with dashes in between"
Prospect: "Huh?"
You: "Kung dash fu dash manchester dot co dot uk"
Prospect: "Oh, okay, got it"

A few hours later, the Prospect gets home and attempts to type the domain from memory.

Errors your prospect could make while typing in the URL from memory:
kung-fumanchester.co.uk (404)
kungfu-manchester.co.uk (404)
kungfumanchester.co.uk (404, or in real life, a visit to your competitors website!)

Point being: Hyphens are search engine friendly, but not people friendly, and since your business will be focused in Manchester, it's important that you can clearly communicate the domain name to your prospects. Even more importantly, your clients must be able to communicate the domain name to their friends and families.

Thank you guys, this information was very helpful.

I just want to make a quick follow up to question 3 if thats okay.



I now understand that sites like socialmarker can be good for getting the word out. But what about backlinks? Will popular social networks count as backlinks?
Will they just be low quality backlinks? This is what concerns me because I have heard that low quality backlinks like sites that are completely unrelated can damage rankings.

Thanks for your responses

Generally speaking (there are always exceptions), links from most social networking sites are 'no-follow' so will not pass any link juice, so in turn will not assist your ranking. They can however, be very useful for providing traffic.

Just a quick observation from reading this thread, I understand you are targetting a local market with your site with 'kung fu manchester' type keywords. I've no idea about the competition or ins and outs of your market, but it might be useful to also try targetting even more locally - Manchester is a big city! If, for example, you are based to the north of the city, is it feasible that someone would travel from the south of the city to you? Your link building strategy may well benefit from targetting your actual suburb as well as the entire city - 'kung fu training moss side' for example.

Correct Roberto! Just keep in mind that someday you may have 4 Kung Fu training outlets throughout Manchester. If your goal is to rule the world, be careful with your domain choice!

Same goes for Kung Fu, What if you find that Kung Fu people only want to train at night, your gym will sit empty all day. You may someday want to have Yoga classes during the day for women. In that case, a great domain name might be BodyandSoulManchester.co.uk, or something more related to a great brand.

If you need a help with keyword research - semrush may help you, good tool.

You can find a forum to learn the simple concept, and then gradually increase, mainly put into practice, practice is the most important.

[QUOTE=ekans]I have being reading various blogs/websites about SEO and I wrote down a few questions as I was going along. Hope that somebody can help me out

It is very rare to see such quality information given to a post by everyone that contributed I would certainly take their advice.

The only thing I can add is if you use a CMS then use word-press as suggested.