There are many factors that all combine to make up effective search engine optimisation, or SEO. One that is sometimes overlooked is the domain name of the web site. Some businesses, presumably thinking in terms of offline brick and mortar stores, encorporate the business name into their domain name. It looks good, it seems right, but is it?

Let’s put it this way… Who is going to search for W. Smith Inc, or The Ultimate Car Repair Shop, or whatever. Unless you have a long term branding plan, don’t put the business name in the domain, unless the business name is also your main keyword.

If you do own The Ultimate Car Repair Shop, then perhaps your main keyword could be “car repairs.” A domain name that incorporated that keyword phrase could get searched for and might be found in the search results. Remember that people are only interested in results for them – not results for you. They really don’t care what your web site’s domain name is as long as it is relevant to what they are searching for.

There was a time when it was common to use hyphens to separate individual words in a domain name. In this way, The Ultimate Car Repair Shop becomes, www.the-ultimate-car-repair-shop.com. However, most of the major search engines seem to be associating multiple hyphens in a domain name with spammers these days. Therefore, it is better to have a domain like, www.theultimatecarrepairshop.com as the search engines have become very good at separating individual words in a domain.

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This entry was posted on Monday, August 27th, 2007 at 8:11 pm and is filed under Domain Names. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.