Why Do I Use Long Domain Names?

One of my previous articles has brought up a couple of questions from readers, one of which I’ll answer right now.

The question is “Why are your domain names so long, with all those dashes in them? Should I be doing that as well?” (A domain name is the .com, .net, or .org part of a web site address – aka URL)

The “right” answer to this question depends significantly on how you intend to drive traffic to your site.

Best Domain Names for Offline Media

If you plan on using radio or television advertising, it is important to be able to make sure your domain name gets heard properly, and then subsequently typed into their browser when they get back to the computer. Combine that with being billed by air time, and you don’t want to waste time having to say the words “dash” between every word. You also want something catchy, rather than your company name. Like WinAFreeTrip.com or FreeCreditReport.com and so forth.

Best Domain Names for SEO

If you plan on using Search Engine Optimization to drive traffic to your site, you have a different battle. You see, people don’t actually type your URL in when using search engines, they just click on a link in the search results. If your domain name looks like spam, searchers will ignore it in the search results. If your domain name has nothing to do with what they’re looking for, they’ll ignore it as well.

But, here’s something interesting that few people realize, but it is VERY important to understand when creating a domain name. Google (and others) believe that the text used to link to your site/page is very descriptive of what will be found there. So when someone links to a page with the phrase “As Stupid as George Bush ”, it increases the chances that someone will find your page when searching for exactly that.

That’s the first piece of the puzzle – the next piece is that frequently, whether in forum postings, news releases, or what-have-you, people just type the full link to where they want you to go. The posting software automatically converts that into a link to your site. So when someone posts a link to your site using your domain name, the search engine sees that the words in the domain name are what someone will find there.

Let’s put that all together – if you have figured out that the people who you will sell your products best to are looking for information on Fog Horn Parts and you want to get search engines traffic to your site. You will do quite well to name your domain Fog-Horn-Parts.com . If .com isn’t available, .net, .org, .info, and .us are all possibilities.

What Google Sees

As a result, when someone links to your site with the text http://www.Fog-Horn-Parts.com , it will link to your site, and the search engines will see that “http www fog horn parts com” is what can be found at your site (turning the weird punctuation into spaces). You would do well, also, when possible, to leave out the “www” part – this wastes a word and distracts the search engine. You NEED the “http://” part to make the link work, so there’s no getting around that, I’m afraid.

You may ask yourself if people really do this – well, here are two real world examples linked to a site run Nina Hershberger who runs MegaBucks Marketing and makes a product called the wallet mailer:

• http://www.dankennedy.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=234&Itemid=200 links with the text “www.wallet-mailer.com”
• http://www.marketingbestpractices.com/Articles/a-most-amazing-direct-mail-letter.htm links with the text “http://www.wallet-mailer.com”

The result of these two links combined with the intentional choice of domain names for Nina’s site results in her site ranking ever so slightly better for the search “Wallet Mailer”, for which she has been coming up number one for several years now. And that’s where I come in. I largely do that through keyword research, article marketing, and a variety of on-page optimizations. (By the way: I use a LOT of pseudonyms, so you won’t be able to track my entire customer list, just by searching for my name.)

Now when someone wants a wallet mailer, Nina doesn’t even have to give them the domain name – all she has to say is “Look up ‘wallet mailer’ on Google, I’m the first link. ” While that’s a great claim for those in the right market, do not get yourself hyped up under the false impression that you can get to this point with such terms as “home loans” or “mortgage” without a tremendous budget behind you to build and maintain such a ranking.

To further justify this advice, some of the top press release and free-reprint-article publishers out there will absolutely not post articles that contain custom linking. They will only generate links back to your site when a full URL is typed into the article. So, you get a link. But the link text will only be your URL – so, the words in your URL have to count. That’s not to say that a link is meaningless. Sure, every link helps, but it makes a lot more sense to make it count as much as possible for your specific target keywords.

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