April 7th, 2008

Choosing a proper domain name can have a huge impact in terms of how it affects your position and ranking on the major search engines. Search engine ranking can mean the difference between languishing in obscurity or getting so crushed with traffic your host wonders what you’re doing right.

Some Critical Factors Your Domain Name (URL) should:
1. Contain key words, whenever possible,
2. Be as short as possible, easy to remember, easy to spell, and easy to share verbally,
3. A dot-com extension. Forget the .us, .biz, .us and other such extensions. When I tell you to check out Amazon, you assume it’s dot-com, and so does everybody else.

1. Key Words in your Domain Name / URL
No one knows the exact algorithms search engines use to determine who comes out on top of the rankings. We’ve authored many sites and had the luxury of observing coding, content and subsequent traffic patterns, and we’ve learned a few things.

Key words in a domain name do have a serious impact as far as the search engines are concerned. MSN seems to give it more weight than other major search engines, but Google and Yahoo still give it weight.

What we’re suggesting here is that if you’re building a site about model airplanes, giving it a domain name like www.modelairplanesofarizona.com, you’ll automatically have better ranking than if you call it www.jasonsmodels.com, even though the latter is shorter.

2. Long Domain Names are Hard to Remember, Easy to Mess Up
Let’s not kid each other, no matter how many key words your domain name has, if you’re trying to launch a site called www.mortgageinvestmenttipssales.com, you’re going to have all kinds of problems where even your loyal fans have an impossible time remembering what it actually is.

3. Dot-Com Extensions are the Best
I made this mistake early on in my career. I had a clever idea and I thought it would be better to launch it as a dot-org, only to find that when I told my friends the URL and they sincerely tried to check it out, they invariably typed in the dot-com extension instead. All my passionate word-of-mouth promotion only paid dividends to my competitor. His site wasn’t better, the only thing he had over me was a better understanding of how to name a domain.

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