Any Website optimization Guru's out here?

[Reg]

Hello all.

We have a small business in Canada that has a company website without the .com designation. The URL that matches ours with .com instead of .on.ca is available so I wondered if it would be a smart thing to grab it up. This would be so no one else can and to hopefully increase traffic.
My web host said they could place a redirect to our .on.ca website if I wished. I wonder if this is the best approach or if this might be an opportunity to have new keywords and then have a link to our website, to hopefully increase the rank/popularity.

The website averages ~5000 hits/day.

We do our website ourselves so any input from some experts would help me out.

Thanks for reading, and for any help.
Reg

[id10t]

You don't need to redirect - you just need to have the new domain name pointing at your current webserver IP address, and the webserver needs to respond to it with the same content as your other domain.

And definately grab up the domain name - cheap insurance ..

[911Rob]

costs $10 to buy a domain name, so what's the question????
Buy the darn thing then have it forwarded to the main site.

We set up websites we buy everything there is and use the one domain with all others forwarded permanetly.

Very easily done?
Let me know if you need help doing it?
Cheers

[Reg]

Thanks for the tips and for the offer to help!

I wondered (or was under the notion) that in having another index or cover page one could have more prime keywords to be picked up by the search engines. Then you could link the pages to eachother. Sort of like being having multiple listings in the yellow pages instead of just one. Does that make sense?

[Sapporo Guy]

Get the domain. Others too!

Could have a HTML redirect with "redirecting comment" and have keywords in the meta-tags and then have more comment in "white" lettering so that end users won't see it.

Not sure what the benefit that is over a straight server redirect....

However, your SEO is still the most important.

[SlowToady]

Possibly, but quite possibly not. Search Engines are smart these days, if you have two similar domains on the same IP address, with the same content, you might actually get penalized for it. If you're going to do that, you want the different domains on different IPs addresses at different hosting companies and you have to carefully manage the campaign. It's quite a lot of work and might not be worth it for you...

Keywords are important, but there are other very, very important factors to consider. In/out bound links, for example. In extreme cases, keyword spamming will drop your placement. It use to be that you wanted a relatively high keyword density, that is, you'd repeat your keywords every 10 or 14 words or so. People started abusing that to get higher rankings and the search algorithms adapted. As a result, keyword density isn't very important.

Like the previous posters said, just register the other name and point it to your .com.

Originally Posted by Reg

Thanks for the tips and for the offer to help!

I wondered (or was under the notion) that in having another index or cover page one could have more prime keywords to be picked up by the search engines. Then you could link the pages to eachother. Sort of like being having multiple listings in the yellow pages instead of just one. Does that make sense?

[911Rob]

Not pure Geek, but from what I know (little) you pick up the domain and have it forwarded to the direct site. This costs only the cost of the domain. ($10) If you were to attach meta-tags and additional inscriptions to the domain it would need to be programed and hosted as well.

Cheers