general questions and adding s to keywords

Hey all! I've been browsing through this forum for a while and finally have decided to take "action" out of every thing I've learned - and hopefully things will take off in the future.

I have a few questions regarding keywords & SEO though before I start.

1) Will adding "s" and "dashes" to the words in my domain affect my standing on search engines? The domains I want for the keywords are already taken but NOT their plural forms with dashes. The registered "good" domains aren't even on google search results.

so I guess i'm wondering if my keyword is say "john wayne" & the domain "johnwayne" is taken, would "john-waynes" do any good as an 'acceptable' domain for SEO - provided that when you search for "john wayne" on google, the johnwayne domain doesn't even pop up.

2) What about net domains? how are they in terms of getting ranked? if the main co-m counterpart is nowhere to be found on Google?

3) How long is a typical wait before a decent website becomes decently ranked on Google provided I do only basic SEO & not a whole lot of spamming blogs/forums, etc..

looking for some fast answer as I want to get started asap!

1. The dashes will not make it any harder to rank. I have noticed that using more than one dash in a domain name seems to lower the click though rate. I think that one does a little as well but the difference was not enough on the sites that I tracked that I could not be positive that there were not other factors involved. I would say adding an s is not going to make much difference at all from what I have seen.

2. .net, .org, and . com's all seem to rank equally well. My personal order is .com, .org and then .net because people seem to react better to .org than to .net but the difference is pretty small.

3. How long is a piece of string? There is really no way to tell as it depends on your keyword competition. Some are easy some not so much. Keyword research is probably the most important step and the one that seems to get overlooked the most. You can do everything else correctly but if you screw up your research then you still will not make any money.

thank you for the answer!

also, say it's the same keyword niche, should I get 2 domains that point to the same site or should I get 2 different site?

say I have a domain with the keyword "john-waynes" and "john-waynes-airport" which pretty much would deal with the same topic, even if I had duplicate sites they'll be prettymuch the same. should I just point them both to the same site or get 2 different sites?

The letter s in a domain can mean two things, a plural from of the keyword or a grammatically incorrect possessive form (without the apostrophe). Google indexes and ranks singular and plural forms of the same keyword separately, so if you get a domain name that is a plural form, it will rank better for the plural form of the keyword. If the plural form gets less search traffic, then you will get less search traffic unless you do some inbound link text optimization for the singular form. Google likes to make things as hard as possible :slomo:

If the s is a possessive form, you will be optimizing the domain name for that, meaning you are going to get traffic for people who type in the grammatically incorrect possessive form. This can be really tricky because of Google's autocorrect feature, so be careful with the possessive forms.

Still fighting the automatic moderation system. How long to rank? Oh gosh, it depends on the competitiveness of the keyword. If you get an uncompetitive long tail niche, you can rank in less than a week these days. With a competitive keyword, it can take months and a whole lot of link building. Videos help too, but the videos need traffic to help you rank.