What’s in a name? Everything.
For startups and early stage businesses, a well-designed corporate website is a must (obviously). But even if you’re not involved with content marketing just yet, search engine optimization practices still need to be taken into account to keep your organization visible online.
Image Creidt: SimpleToRemember.com
For new or even young websites, the biggest SEO decision you make may very well be your domain name – and you can’t afford to mess it up.
First, to avoid any confusion, your site domain name is generally the name and extension following “www.” in a Web address. For example, in the URL www.cloudcomputing.com, the domain name is “cloudcomputing.com”.
There is some debate about exactly how much value search engines like Google place on keyword domain names when it comes to overall page rank. Based on my experience, however, it matters quite a bit. I’ve seen plenty of pages — that were poorly optimized overall — rank very well around a particular search term just by having that term in the domain and page title. We’ve seen many websites overhaul their legacy dynamic URL structures (a bunch of useless numbers and characters) to take advantage of search-friendly pages URLs (the title of the page appears in the URL itself). Similarly, some sites have gone a step further and changed their domain names as well, having seen the value that a well optimized domain has to offer.
Now a corporate domain name change is not something that should be entered into lightly. First, the domain affects the URL of every page on your site. Therefore, any change requires 301 redirects for each page/URL under the old domain to its corresponding page using the new domain URL. The more pages your site has, the more complicated this is to pull off. Second, your domain name is part of your company brand, and you don’t want to risk confusion or brand disassociation with your audience.
The best case scenario is to choose the right domain name from the start. But whether you are starting from scratch or re-optimizing an old one, there are some proven best practices that I believe can help:
1. Balance name recognition with SEO. For corporate sites, it’s obviously important to have your company name front and center in your domain. But there still might be opportunities to optimize your domain for target keywords. For example, a cloud services company called Sigma might be found at the domain “sigma.com”, which is great for branding purposes but doesn’t say anything about what the company actually does.
Instead, what if the company went with “sigmacloudservices.com” or “sigmacloud.com”? Now the company’s domain name would be adding value toward a descriptive keyword or phrase that folks might be searching for.
For content marketers with additional blogs or microsites that are complimentary to their main corporate sites, there might even be a little more flexibility here to develop more optimized domains. The same goals/principles would apply to all parts of your corporate domain name strategy.
2. Density matters. When researching SEO, you’re bound to stumble upon the idea of keyword density. For domain purposes, this basically refers to the percentage of letters in your domain that are geared toward a specific keyword phrase. For example, if our fake company Sigma was targeting the phrase “cloud services”, their domain of sigmacloudservices.com would have a density of about 72%. Again, it’s debatable how much of a factor density truly plays here, but most SEO experts agree that it has value.
3. To hyphen, or not to hyphen? Though not quite as popular as certain tired writing clichés (guilty!), many sites have opted to hyphenate the words within their domains (Example: sigma-cloudservices.com). This is mainly due to domain name availability issues, though some SEO pros do believe that hyphens help search engines parse out individual keywords. Me? I don’t think hyphenated domains make any difference at all when it comes to SEO, and will probably only serve to hurt your overall branding. I’d always go with “not to hyphen” when possible.
These are just a few best practices that I believe in, but there’s more to choosing the best domain name for your site then what I have listed here (like making sure the phrase you are targeting actually has search value). For more information, I recommend checking out these great videos from Noble Samurai on domain name SEO with Kenny Goodman. Kenny has basically made a career out of domain names, and has some great insight to offer.
The one big thing to remember here is that domain name optimization is only one facet of a sound SEO strategy. It won’t get you to the top of Google’s rankings on its own, but getting your name right from the start can save you a lot of time and energy in the long run. So choose wisely.
You can find more information on content marketing and editorial practices at the OpenView Labs website. You can also follow Brendan on Twitter @BrenCournoyer and find more from the OpenView team @OpenViewVenture.