Choosing Domain Names

by: George Bounacos Monday, August 24th, 2009

Image by ocean.flynn via Flickr

Working with small businesses, we often have the awesome opportunity to help create branding from the very beginning. What we’ve learned over time, and what is borne out by SEOmoz’s biannual survey of SEO experts, is that the domain name is important.

How important?

The panel of 100 experts, most of whom I would hire without hesitation if I needed assistance on a large scaling project, ranked having a keyword in the domain name as the 3rd most important of 24 keyword variables in optimizing a site for search engine prominence. Yes, 24 keyword variables. And there are probably more. SEO isn’t black magic and it certainly isn’t some mechanical endeavor. Optimization properly done is a blend of art and science that never ends because mores, vocabulary and searching habits constantly change.

But back up to that whole domain and keyword issue.

Your domain name doesn’t need to be your company’s name. You should, however, have your corporate name as a name you point to a brandable name that has a keyword present in its root (the words between the www and the dot whatever). Once you add a slash, the importance goes down. Having the keyword there is always important, but having the keyword as the main part of your domain is important.

I was reminded of this when talking with Ben Simon, the founder of development shop Ideas2Exectuables today. Ben also gets to create many online presences from scratch and sees much of what I see: non-brandable names, lots of extraneous information, too many names-separated-by-dashes-because-the-cool-name-is-gone and even worse.

We’re a great example of the concept. Our name is Silver Beacon Marketing. We own the domain silverbeaconmarketing.com. Boy, that’s a lot to key in. So when Sara and I were brainstorming our brand, one theme that consistently registered was the idea of team. Out of that was born sbmteam.com, which violates the keyword rule, but definitely is brandable and a whole lot shorter than the company name.

You don’t have to use your company name. Sometimes you shouldn’t. And sometimes you can use a name absolutely unrelated to your company name like we did since we wanted to create a brand. But if you don’t have a brand strategy and you are not constantly practicing SEO on each page of your site, work with your marketer to determine your domain name’s strategy.

One of our probono clients, the International Children’s Festival at Wolf Trap, hit a home run when they got the name “internationalchildrensfestival.org”. Others aren’t quite so lucky, but this is an awesome show with a huge brand throughout the Mid-Atlantic so violating the number of letters issue worked out fine for them.

Don’t base your plans on availability — base your plan on what makes sense for your marketing efforts. And buy your own name already, will ya?