What’s in a domain name
search engine optimization, web marketingSome of you may remember that, what seems like a lifetime ago, I asked those that follow me on twitter what they thought was important when choosing a domain name…
Based on the feedback I received and what I’ve learnt through experience here is my handy guide to help you pick the best domain name for your website.
The first thing to consider is what is more important, search engine optimization or company branding?
If you are a company that isn’t as well known as the likes of EBay or BT etc. you may want to consider a domain name that includes specific keywords. For example, if I was selling cosmetics online but my company name was Burgoine’s of Shropshire, www.burgoinesofshropshire.co.uk wouldn’t really help me appear high in the rankings next to some of the cosmetic giants. Something along the lines of www.burgoinescosmetics.co.uk is far more likely to help. However, if people are more likely to search for your company rather than your services then www.burgoinesofshropshire.co.uk would be perfectly acceptable.
Next, should you use .com, .eu, .co.uk ?
This depends on two things, where are you based and where is your target audience? A .com domain gives your site a more global feel and if your audience is worldwide will definitely help ensure you appear in search engine rankings even if they are country specific. A .co.uk domain immediately tells people where you are based and will ensure you are not excluded from listings where someone has selected “pages from the UK”. If you are an organization you may want to consider using .org instead of .co.uk or .com. This extension is mostly used by charities and non-profit organizations so if that suits your websites agenda it can add more credibility.
Should you buy more than one domain name?
Wherever possible, I recommend buying both the .com and the .co.uk version of a domain name simply to protect the “brand”. After that I believe its personal choice. If you have chosen a keyword driven domain name, I recommend buying the company name as well, again to protect the “brand”. You can easily set up web forwarding to point these domain names to your site. Don’t however; point them to ‘doorway’ pages (pages that are optimized to specific keywords and then forward onto other, less relevant pages). Remember how BMW got crippled for doing exactly that? You can view the BBC news article on that here
How long should the domain name be?
Ideally the domain name should be short and snappy, this isn’t for any technical reason, it is purely because you want people to remember it. The domain name for this site could have been www.web-ramblings-by-kirsty-burgoine.co.uk, but who would remember that? www.web-ramblings.co.uk is much shorter and much more memorable.
Should you use hyphens?
As far as I have seen, there is no advantage or dis-advantage to using hyphens in a domain name, Google will see the words within the url either way so it really is personal preference.
These guidelines are not set in stone, what you need to consider differs depending on the main objective of your website, however, they should help get you started. I got a lot of really interesting feedback about this subject when I conducted my Twitter experiment, if you are interested you can read all of the comments here.
Tags: domain names, guide, search engine optimization, SEO, url
Given this is the second time i’ve wrote this due to my silly internet i will keep it short and sweet.
This is a pretty damn good article, the only thing i’d be careful of is not linking your domain with your audience, certain words will alienate certain members of your audience! such as using “hip” or “slang” words will turn off the older population generally…
secondly use of hyphens… ok has no effect on search engines but again remember the user in this having seven or eight of them means you won’t be remembered… keep domains short if including them… also as part of branding attempt to keep the same structure such that if you have a domain with hyphens for one part of your company have it for another even if its only a redirect (301).
otherwise superb article … wrote one not to dissimilar in april – http://andykinsey.co.uk/designing-urls-top-10-rules/2009/
nice post.
ohhhh bug bear of mine… dates in url’s …. but lets not go there
Some really interesting points here. It’s something that is sometimes taken for granted (with sometimes disasterous consequences!)
http://www.msmobilenews.com/windows-mobile/news/bad-choice-of-domain-names-its-silly.html
The advantage of choosing a brand as the domain name, is that it is (possibly) easy to spell; The story of the Kodak brand name came to mind (here is a potted version):
Why the name Kodak? It was short, and easy to pronounce. In the 1920s Eastman wrote: The letter “K” had been a favourite with me – it seems a strong, incisive sort of letter. It became a question of trying out a great number of combinations of letters that made words starting and ending with “K”.
But what I dislike at the moment is the current trend of removing vowels, or making up domains with so called ‘domain hacks’ – great for a unique name, but harder when a domain is just heard and not written down.
Regarding hyphens in a domain, I think Matt Cutts of Google sums it up best: “Google doesn’t algorithmically penalize for dashes in the url” – http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/dashes-vs-underscores/
Thanks for your comments guys,
Some of those domain names are disastrous! ~ grin!
The Experts Exchange url is a good example of why hyphenated domain names are sometimes a very good idea!
Ok but how many aliases are too many? For example with the name Joe Bloggs I would probably want the following:
joebloggs.co.uk
joebloggs.com
joe-bloggs.co.uk
joe-bloggs.com
This may seem a bit excessive, but I can’t help but think they are all too similar, purchasing all will protect ones name and thus their brand.
Just a thought, be good to think what you all think
Personally, I think that if you want to protect all of those domain names, buy them and forward them to the main website. That’s perfectly fine.
The danger with this technique is if you forward them to less relevant pages that have been optimised for keywords that are not relevant, that’s when you will be penalized by search engines.