Domain Power

What's in a domain? That depends upon whether you're a person or a search engine.

Below are some hints for how you can make your domain name a workhorse for your web site.

Should you use a generic domain name or your company name?

A generic domain name is one that describes what your company does, rather than who you are. For example, instead of having "acme-carpeting.com", you might choose "carpeting-bargains.com".

What are the advantages and disadvantages? Well, the generic name can get you visitors who simply type a "generic" address into their browser's address bar. It can also result in slightly higher search rankings for searches on the specific keywords in the name, as discussed in the next section below. However, if you use your company name, this is likelier to be remembered by return visitors and by anyone you have name recognition with.

To use hyphens or not to use hyphens?

The jury's still out on this one, frankly. If your domain name contains more than one keyword, some search engines will index these and will rank you slightly higher if the keywords are separated by a hyphen: acme-carpeting will have extra keyword indexing of "acme" and "carpeting" in the search listings, which will help keyword relevancy scores for searches on those words. If you want to go totally generic, try something like "carpet-bargains" to get higher indexing on the words "carpet bargains".

If you don't hyphenate and use something like "acmecarpeting", that's one heckuva keyword but it will be indexed for searches specifically on "acmecarpeting".

If you plan to rely totally on search engines, by all means go for the hyphens for the extra little boost it may give your ranking. However, remember that hyphens tend to reduce ease of typing a URL, and many people confuse hyphens with underscores_. Hyphenated names also are often longer and more difficult for many people to remember. Additionally, because of the hype a few years ago about "hyphenless domain names", many people expect to type a url as run-on name with no hyphens.

Note about keywords: Just because you have a keyword or two in your domain name does not guarantee a high ranking in the search engine listings. Rank is dependent upon many other factors as well - as discussed HERE.

Here's one secret of the pros:

To cover your bases, you may want to register both a generic domain name if possible, plus your company domain name. If there's a question of hyphenating, consider registering different versions of that. And you may even want to register a domain with a common misspelling of your domain name. Use one domain, the one you think is most likely to work best for you, for your actual web space. Then re-direct the other domain names to your web site. A simple redirect which directs another domain to your home page is called "parking" your domain. Many web hosting providers include domain parking with web hosting accounts. The number of extra parked domains varies with the level of service you pay for. This is usually far cheaper than paying for separate redirect hosting for each of your extra domains.

Subdomains - another not-so-secret secret

If your web hosting provider includes subdomains in your hosting services, you're in luck. Search engines give much higher preference to top-level domain pages (acme.com) over lower-level domains (acme.com/widgets). Sometimes even only the main page (index.html or default.html) is indexed for searches. Therefore you may be at the search spiders' mercy for indexing of all the other pages in your site, especially if you have a huge site with many pages organized into many categories, subcategories, etc.

One way to help the odds is to divide your web site into sections. Put your home page, contact page, policies, and other general information about your company in the top level. Put all your "widgets" information into a subdomain (widgets.acme.com). When you submit your web site to search engines, submit widgets.acme.com as a separate domain. Although all the "widgets" files are actually just in a subdirectory in your web space, by setting up a subdomain called widgets.acme.com, it becomes indexed as a separate top-level domain in the the search engines. Voila - an extra listing! Be sure to check with your hosting provider about setting up subdomains.