The question of what to name a web site is always a big one. When selecting a name, most people think in terms of their business name, personal name, or a word or phrase that has meaning for them. What they often don’t consider is how that name will work for the site’s SEO. Does the name have anything at all to do with the site, or is it completely unrelated?
Have you ever wondered why a company might be willing to pay millions of dollars for a domain name? The domain name business.com was purchased for $7.5 million in 1999 and was recently thought to be valued at more than $300 million. Casino.com went for $5.5 million and worldwideweb.com sold for $3.5 million. What’s so important about a name?
Choosing the right site name
Where SEO is concerned, the name of your web site is as important as many of the other SEO elements that you need to consider. Try this test. Use your favorite search engine to search for a topic, perhaps ‘‘asphalt-paving business.’’ When your search results are returned, look at the top five results. Most of the time, a web site containing those words will be returned in those top five results, and it will often be in the number one slot.
In other words, if your company name is ABC Company but your business is selling nutmeg graters, consider purchasing the domain name NutmegGraters . com, instead of ABC Company . com. ABC Company may not get you in the top of search rankings, but the very specific nature of your product probably will; and both the content of your site and your domain name will attract crawlers in the way you want. Using a domain name containing a keyword from your content usually improves your site ranking.
A few more things that you should keep in mind when you’re determining your domain name include the following:
- Keep the name as short as possible. Too many characters in a name mean increased potential for misspellings. It also means that your site address will be much harder for users to remember unless it’s something really startling.
- Avoid dashes, underscores, and other meaningless characters. If the domain name that you want is taken, don’t just add a random number or piece of punctuation to the name in order to ‘‘get close.’’ Close doesn’t count here. Instead, try to find another word that’s relevant and possibly included in the list of keywords you’ll be using. For example, instead of purchasing www . yourwebsite2 . com, try something like www . yoursitesubject . com.
- Opt for a .com name whenever possible. There are a lot of domain extensions to choose from, such as info, biz, us, tv, names, and jobs, but if the .com version of your chosen domain name is available, that’s always the best choice. Users tend to think in terms of .com, and any other extension will be harder for them to remember. Com names also tend to receive higher rankings in search engines than web sites using other extensions, so if your competition has www . yoursite . com and you choose to use www . yoursite . biz, chances are good that the competition will rank higher in search results than you.
Try this: Choose a random term and then use your favorite search engines to search for that term. Looking only at the top one or two pages of search results, how many of those sites have an extension other than .com? If you do see extensions other than .com, they’re likely to be .org, .net, .gov, or .edu—and you probably won’t see many of those. That’s how prevalent .com is, and it illustrates why you should try to use it whenever possible.