The vast majority of people who take that path end up spending more time working to get that traffic (and those sales) to their site than if they just spent the time on their own site to make it rank for the keywords included in the new domain names. I mean, if you can’t get your main site to rank for “barber shop cityname,state” or “barbershop townname” it’s likely your time and money would be more wisely spent picking up some SEO knowledge. Do yourself a favor: forget about those domain names you just bought and let their registration lapse when they come up for renewal next year.

It’s a question that gets asked surprisingly often. For those of you reading this who were about to ask that question, read on.  For those who have found themselves answering this question on several or more occasions, there might be a few tips in here that you can include in your answer the next time.

Fist of all, 2 months is not really much time for a site to be online and to start getting any kind of organic traffic, you should be thinking in the 3, 4, 5 month ballpark before it starts kicking in.  Google will probable take longer than Yahoo or Bing.

As far as getting “major organic searches”, it’s going to take more than just time for that to happen. Here at Metapilot, we often get asked this question by new site owners. Besides time, you need to be investing resources into your site’s content, optimization, back links and analytics in order for the site to start paying you back with traffic.

In order to make sure things are on the right track at this point, here are a few things you look at:

First, do the following search in Google, Yahoo, and Bing:
site:mydomain.com (replace mydomian.com with your domain name without the www).

Notice if all of the pages you’ve created on your site are listed in the results of each of those searches. If not, ensure that your site is not all in flash, that your navigation is not in flash or JavaScript, that your default page is not completely in Flash, and work on getting some decent links to your site.

Do each of the pages that show up in the site:mydomain.com search contain unique snippets (the snippet is the link and the description that is listed for each page)?  If not, edit each of your pages’ html to include a unique title tag and meta description tag that is relevant specifically to it’s specific page.

Does the URL (web page address)  that shows up for each listing in the site:mydomain.com search include the www or not?  if not, you may have canonicalization issues to address.  Go  to Google webmaster tools and select your preferred domain, make sure that links to your homepage from within your site all point to your preferred domain, make sure that your designer used your preferred domain when linking to your site from their portfolio, and verify that any directory or other links you’ve been building are also pointing to your preferred domain.

Make sure that you’ve submitted your site through each of the search engine’s local/maps interfaces and that you’ve submitted it to the Yellow Pages, Citysearch, local.com, Superpages.com, and Insiderpage.com

After doing all of that, focus on keyword research, building content pages focused around your keyword research, and on link building.

Well, first off, you want to find your low hanging fruit:  Go to your analytics, research what keywords are currently producing search engine traffic for your site (long tail or otherwise) and what landing pages visitors are arriving to your site on via those keywords. (For example, if you use Google analytics, go to traffic sources|keywords for your list of traffic-producing keywords and then either manually do a search with each keyword to see where your site ranks or drop them into rank tracking software, such as that which is included in WebCEO—which, besides providing ranking info, will also show the landing page for each search, as well.)

Then analyze each keyword’s ranking vs. the optimization of its landing page. For example, if you’re getting some traffic for “distance running training” but your landing page for that keyword ranks in Google in the middle of page two and hasn’t yet been well optimized, then you should expect a decent bang for your buck by spending some time on that page and working to bump it up to page one.  Do this for all of your keywords.

Once you’ve completed all of that, move on to the harder-core tasks of keyword research and content creation.  My keyword research tool of preference is Nichebot because its excel-exportable lists are generated not only with a (very) rough ballpark of daily traffic potential for each keyword but also with a tailorable computation of the amount of competition that exists for each keyword.  Whether you prefer to massage your lists in excel or within NicheBot’s online environment (which is quite robust) it’s easy to sort your columns to view which keywords fall into the sweet spot of less competitors and higher expected traffic.

Then, starting with the most appropriate combinations of keyword relevance, keyword competition, and predicted traffic, start creating content that will support a page focused on each keyword (and maybe a small handful of closely related but secondary keywords or phrases).  When creating your pages, keep in mind your optimization basics: A page name that will get the keyword included in the URL, a short title tag that uses the keyword near the beginning, a description meta tag that broadly and succinctly describes the information on the page, an H1 header near the top of the HTML, and two to four (or more) paragraphs of content that utilize your keyword in a variety of forms, as well as broad spectrum of vocabulary that closely relates to your keyword.

And there you have it.  Before you know it, your site will be all optimized, you’ll have your feet propped up on your desk and your hands clasped comfortably behind your head and you’ll be thinking to yourself “Shoot, if I knew it was going to that easy, I wouldn’t have waited so long to take care of it!

As far as SEO goes, the use of keywords in the URL provides only a very slight ranking advantage and should be limited to the keywords focused on in the optimization of the page. If a page is about household furnishings in general and you are optimizing the page for the keyword “antique bookends” then it would make most sense to use only “camaro” as the page name in that in the URL.

If your page is specifically about the 1969 Corvette and you are optimizing the page for that keyphrase then it is conceivable that the use of all three of those terms would be advantageous for SEO and for click through rate (if someone is search for info on that specific car).

Let’s look at your specific example of “/chevrolet_classic_car_automobile_corvette_1969… vs. “/1969_corvette.html”. At Metapilot, we would see it like this:

1. Your on-page optimization should be focused on fewer words than chevrolet, classic, car, automobile, and corvette. Not only is that just too many broad terms to use for a single page’s optimization, the use of all those terms in the URL is going to dilute any advantage you might get from adding keywords to the URL. Keeping the optimization for a page focused to a single keyword or short keyphrase is often best and the use of a page’s keywords in the URL is just part of properly optimizing a page.

2. It’s just a bit spammy looking and thus, such a URL could have a negative effect on click-through. No one is going to use words combined in that order in everyday speech so besides looking long and weird, it just feels weird, too.

3. When you are using multiple words in your URL, algorithmically it is best to use hyphens rather than underscores to separate your words.