A Good Idea or Over-Marketing?
The question comes up time and again–is there any value to including terms where you want to rank well in your domain name?
Will this help you get better position in search results? What are other aspects of using this approach? And if it is used, what’s the best approach?
The Benefits
For most any Web site, take a look at the terms in the domain name and do a Google search for those terms. You’ll see that the site is likely to rank high on those terms. Of course, often the terms are often the company brand, that’s central to the site and is mentioned over and over in every page. So the domain name wasn’t Google’s only cue that this site is highly relevant to this term.
I’ve been doing SEO for fifteen years, and one of the only aspects of SEO that’s stayed the same is that Google uses the terms in the domain name as an important indicator of the content of the site. Again and again, I’ve seen that one of the best ways to get good position in search results is to use keywords in the domain name. There’s no guarantee, but with some promotion, it’s a good way to help get good positions in search results.
The Issue
There’s one huge issue, though, and it’s the same issue that runs through all SEO. Do you want to write the content of the site, choose the domain name , all of this, for Google, or for the people you’d like to have as customers? If you build the site for people and not for Google, then it might be great at attracting customers, but no customers who are searching for you will find the site! On the other hand, if you write just for search engines, then you’ll be found but your site may not bring you customers.domain-name. There’s a balance to be struck, and what’s the correct balance depends on your particular situation.
You’d like your domain name to be easy to remember for your customers. The logical choice for the URL, then, is your brand. Your customers use your product or service, and if they remember the brand, they can find you on the Internet easily by searching for the brand. If you’re a professional and do business in your own name, then you hope they remember your name, and you’d want to use that in your domain name. You’d rather be “Bill Smith, Attorney at Law” than “Gaithersburg Lawyer”.
On the other hand, if you’re an attorney just starting out, with no name recognition and no traffic to your site, using gaithersburglawyer.com as a domain name will help you get position in search results for people looking from a Gaithersburg lawyer. Particularly if you have a new Web site, you’ll have no position in search results, and it’ll take you time to get that position, so this legitimate short-cut to position in search results could be a good idea for you.
The Answer
What to do? It’s a matter of balance. For many small businesses, you may not have a lot of brand recognition, so you can use a domain name with keywords. Find something your customers can remember easily, and go with it. If you’re a professional, the same idea can work for you. You’ll promote your own name again and again on the site, so you’ll show up high in searches on your name. You can safely use a domain name based on keywords.
If you’re just getting established, then the keyword approach can be particularly useful for you.
What About Hyphens?
There’s an active dialogue about whether hyphens hurt search results position. But Google themselves ends this disagreement. Their Webmaster Guidelines say
“The URL http://www.example.com/green-dress.html is much more useful to us than http://www.example.com/greendress.html. We recommend that you use hyphens (-) instead of underscores (_) in your URLs.”
So Google actually recommends the use of hyphens. That’s good news, because hyphens also make domain names more readable. A hyphenated domain name also avoids misinterpretations that could occur with domain names such as these, that are all real domain names:
Should You Change Your domain name ?
If you’ve decided that you’d like to change your domain name , you can do it without losing all of the search results positions that you’ve achieved over the years. Just get your Webmaster to establish 301 redirect commands for all the pages of your site, so that anyone who references an old URL will be taken to the new one. Google recognizes a 301 redirect as a notice that the content of a page has been moved to a new address; you won’t lose your position in search results.
The Bottom Line
Choose your domain name as part of your overall marketing strategy. Are you trying to establish your business or is your site taking advantage of an established brand? And should you decide to change your domain name , you can do it without giving up your positions in search results.
