Domain Names and URL Choices

Sometimes the domain name you choose or the url you use can impact how well your site does. There are a few things you should look at when it comes to managing how you decide to portray these.

What is the importance of a domain names as it relates to SEO? Do you need to stuff it with keywords? Does it matter what case you use? Should you add hyphens or underscores?

A domain name may be an actual registered domain name that you purchased, such as domain.com, or it can refer to www.domain.com. Your url can refer to any page on your website, including the common index page usually represented by  http://www.domain.com/index.html.

Your primary focus when choosing a domain name is ease of recognition. Your future customers should be able to  first associate your domain name with the product or service they are seeking, then be able to retain it for future reference.

Most systems are not case sensitive. You can use capitalization to make your domain name easier to read. Your url will of course show as all lowercase. This means while you may call your domain MyCoolDomain, the url will still read mycooldomain – so this is really only good for anchor text or when you are trying to make your name easier to read and remember.

If you want your domain name and your url to both read the same and show separation between the words, you can use hyphens or underscores. Keep in mind that this action does make it harder for people typing in your address to get it right – and unless you own all three versions ( hyphenated, underscored or no spaces at all), someone could possibly nick your traffic.

However, hyphenation or underscoring may be the only way to avoid unusual urls from being misread. Several examples respectable companies have had humiliating moments in the past few decades because their url could be misinterpreted, simply because the run together url made it possible to come up with a completely different set of words.

The programmer website called Experts Exchange had a domain called expertsexchange.com. After several embarrasing enquiries about gender reassignment, they added a hyphen to their domain name to make it read read experts-exchange.com! The government owned site Colorado that paid a twenty dollar bounty for coyotes originally was mistaken for ‘pay sex trade ad’ which resulted in some red faces before they amended their domain name to read pays-extra-dead.com

If you can secure all the variants of your domain, using a hyphenated or underscored version as your main url and redirecting the others is the simplest way to promote recognition. Ifyou have a double letter in the middle of your url that might be mistyped; foresttrails.com, for example, you may consider hyphenating it to read forest-trails.com.

Don’t be misguided into thinking that misspellings will bring in huge amounts of traffic – Google suggests alternates and people redirect themselves more often than not. Avoid trademark infringement regarding name brands. Use hyphens or underscores to create a clearer picture, not a muddier one.

Create a domain name that will grab attention, deliver your message and snag the consumer – then turn around and look good as a url. Five words is better than seven, and three is better than five, so keep it short and sweet!