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Back in “them dar days” of the early internet, the mad rush to capture website identities created some strange, less than perfect results – especially in regards to optimal search engine optimization (SEO).

Sometimes the focus was on capturing the company’s name – which is fine if your name is recognized market wide. Apple, Dell, Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, etc., do not suffer in worldwide recognition. Their name branding will carry a large part of searches for their website.

But, how about the smaller company which does have such recognition?

Unfortunately, the focus in domain names for most smaller companies was what they were used to in yellow page or other listings where categories positioned them where they could be found.

Consider a scenario for a small plastics company in the late ™90’s™ – which we will call Phred Plastics Company. They were probably ecstatic to capture phred.com as their domain name. It related exactly with their company name, was easy to remember for their current customers, short to convey to new customers via phone or direct contact. It just seemed perfect.

Now consider how potential clients search for products or services in today’™s marketplace. Unless the potential client knows the company name, keywords are the only means to find exactly what the potential client is searching to find. So, will a search for “plastics” find Phred Plastics? With a properly designed website rich in keywords, page titles, strong backlinks, etc. – the answer is yes. However, it may not be in an advantageous position to gather strong traffic. After all, there are thousands of companies competing in this space – as there are for almost all keywords.

Domain names rich in keyword identity have a major advantage in today’™s SEO. Other things being equal, a website name including a focused keyword will get great positioning in search results, as well as a branding association with the specific business of the website.

Consider another scenario. This time Phred Plastics opted for phredplastics.com as well as phred.com. How might this have been better?

Search engines rely on the words in the body text and other areas of code on your website pages. If your site and domain name are highly related to the phrases you wish to rank highly for, adding those phrases to your sites content will be so much easier.

The weight of your domain name can be considerable in getting better search results. In the case of Phred, using the domain name of phredplastics.com as the website name will give better search results. Having phred.com as the marketing name, with phred.com being directed to phredplastics.com gives Phred the advantage of using phred.com in all it’™s correspondence with the full URL of phredplastics.com carrying better weight with the search engines.

Taking an additional step, if Phred was an injection molded plastics company, using phredinjectionmoldedplastics.com would furnish more focused search results for the longer string searches most of use today.

If Phred could go back in time and capture injectionmoldedplastics.com they could have the best of all worlds. Such focused domains carry great SEO.

We have seen any number of domain names that do little to help SEO. Contractions of names, initials, abbreviations, etc., all hinder SEO and do not facilitate easy name recognition for use in marketing.

Consider poorer options that Phred may have taken:

• ppc.com – initials, why not?
• pplast.com – contractions

Neither of these do anything for domain SEO, but are quite common today on many small businesses. Many such companies have had quality websites but find themselves still behind the search engine curve with companies with better domain SEO.

Can your domain name be fixed?

Yes. With proper restructuring and SEO, a strategy for improving your sitea’™s domain SEO can be put in place which can greatly improve your search results.

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