The Importance of your Domain Name

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”
- Juliet, Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

Although Juliet’s sentiment may hold true for a rose, this line of reason does not always hold true in the world of business. One such place where a name can be considerably more important that being just a word to identify something is when it comes to your domain name – your business’s online address. Just as ensuring that your brand stands out and is easily recognizable, it is also important to ensure that this brand recognition extends to your online presence as well.

It is often times not enough ‘just to have a website’ online for your business, but that your website is also easily locatable and recognizable. One way to address both of concerns is with your domain name. Securing a domain name that is close to the name of your business or reflects your line of business is very important for multiple reasons.

First, a good domain name can help your customers quickly identify your business – just as they would identify your business by a business sign. Your business, let’s just say “Bob’s Boats” for the purposes this example, is far more easily identifiable by bobsboats.com than it would be at bb.com, bobsb.com or bboats.com. Customers’ often feel more comfortable visiting a site when they can easily associate the domain name (bobsboats.com) with the actual business name that they have become comfortable with (Bob’s Boats) – using your real-world credibility to strengthen your online credibility.

Equally, if not more important is the fact that a good top-level domain can greatly increase a sites SEO. Most search engines place value – in the way that they rank sites – for readable and easily identifiable domain names. Although there is much debate on the importance of domain names in regards to SEO, most would generally agree that a good domain is important and can directly influence your SEO.

Just has always been the case in the online world, the rules are changing in the world of Domain SEO. Recently, Matt Cutts, Google principal engineer indicated that Google was changing their algorithms for ranking sites – specifically in regards to domain names. In the past, one could identify a good idea and register a domain closely aligned with the idea and capitalize off of its popularity – despite this idea and domain not really ‘being their business’, but instead a scam of sorts to generate quick traffic (and money). This often times left the legitimate business to suffer, as they had to compete with the aforementioned site for search engine ranking (order that one appears within search results). According to Cutts, domain names will still play a vital role in ranking, but its importance will be deceased and actual “content keywords” (relevant words within the content of the website) will be increased to help counter such fraudulent behavior as is detailed above.

Regardless of changes in the way that Google and other search engines vary their ranking of domains and content, one thing is certain – it is still very important that you act soon to ensure that your business’s presence is established in a clear and easily identifiable way online. The best way to ensure that your customers do not wind up at another company’s site or worse yet, a fake site that can damage your credibility in their minds, is to ensure that you own your brand’s online address and that your site is optimized in every way possible to ensure that those looking for you can most easily find you.

To learn more and to ensure that your brand is secured online, contact our talented team of experts at Whiteboard IT today by calling 205-588-7102 or by emailing firststep@whiteboard-it.com today!