Naming a country-targeted site SEO and brandability

[JTJagger]

Hi all,

We all know geographic targeting was all the SEO rage in 2008.

I'm launching a country-specific poker community site, that will offer services for local players, and will be community driven, but with both content and services on offer.

I'm in the very fortunate position of having come into 2 excellent domain names. I'd like discussion and opinions as to which is perferable, from:
a) an SEO standpoint, and
b) a brandability standpoint.

The names are:
1. pokerCC.com
2. pokerplayers.CC
(where CC is the country code of the targeted country).

This particular project is in a market with little/no competition for generic poker keywords.

Thoughts?

Thanks in advance for your thoughtful discussion.

Best,
JT

[Guerreiro]

I would say pokerplayers (translated as well maybe in the country's language).CC

You then have an excellent brand and from a SEO aspect, you can really get a lot of benefit out of geotargeted SEO.

[Unknown Webmaster]

Is English the primary language?

If not, it would definitely go with the local TLD. Using pokerCC.com would confuse a ton of people, and half your returning visitors would end up on poker.CC.

[Harry Zack]

Ditto above. Google knows what language it is and where it should be for SEO reasons and ranking it in the according google.whatever. Also, .com versions you can tell google in WMT what country you are targeting.

[JTJagger]

And what if it's an English speaking country?

[Harry Zack]

I've never heard of .CC tld to be honest, so I cant imagine the market being that huge for organic SEO presence anyways. Google.cc redirects to to google.com anyways. This one I think boils down to which you like better and feels more brandable. If you had a decent sized market share I'd go with the .cc extension but it doesn't seem like you do. It's be hard to build a community around such a small market share. Hard to say, the .cc extension might scare away non .cc visitors as well, as I wouldnt participate in a forum if it had that extension (or any other non country specific similiar tld except for the normal .net, .org etc) so you might be limiting yourself.

In this case, I'd go with pokercc.com as you have more options with this. If you really want to target your GEO of choice, just tell google in WMT.

[Guerreiro]

.cc stands for country code, so .co.uk for UK and .nl for Netherlands, .fr for France etc you get the gist. All of the above cases have a .cc = .co.uk, .nl, .fr respectively.

I hope that was clear.

[Unknown Webmaster]

If English is the primary language I would still stay clear of pokerCC.com, if it can be confused with poker.CC when saying it out loud.

When it is a community based site I think the benefits from having a domain that "makes sense" will outweigh any initial seo boost you may see. I have been using sites that used .com even though they were local, and it really confused me the first couple of times I visited them.

[Guerreiro]

I agree with UW, if you make it like pokerUK.com or pokerNL.com it looks weird and probably does not add a lot of weight.