Phone Book Directories
If the phone book directories were the only source of qualified site traffic you would do well to compete for aaa- and aardvark- prefixed names. The local online directories do have some of the market. Verizon Super Pages gives customers a choice to sort listings alphabetically. Its default listing, though, is not alphabetical. The initial sort is “Standard,” i.e., the most relevant according to MSN’s algorithm.
The customer has to scroll to the bottom and choose “A-Z” to see an alphabetical listing. She can also choose “Distance” (from the customer-entered-location), which to me is the most logical sort for a list of kitchen designers.
Yahoo Local sorts by “Top Results,” listing those results that have keywords and other Search Engine Optimization (SEO) web site features closest to the terms the customer input.
Search Engines
Super Pages and Yahoo Local are just a small potential source of your qualified web site traffic. The Big 3 search engines will drive most of the real kitchen buyers to your site. Optimizing – and marketing – your site for the Google, Yahoo and MSN search engines, while keeping the local directories in mind, will cover 99.9% of your web site traffic universe planning. Since the local directories are showing the listing results in the same order as the search engines (most “relevant” first), the first letter of the domain name is not an important factor in getting good results. Neither the local directories nor the search engines display the listing results in alphabetical order by default.
Hyphenating the Domain Name
So now the question is: What is a good domain name? Some evidence exists that hyphenating a domain name yields greater results because there’s no question about the individual words. For instance, new-hampshire-kitchen-design.com might be better than newhampshirekitchendesign.com. The hyphens are harder for humans to remember (we expect the “all one word” type of domain name).
Search engines do examine the domain name and do give it some weight. They also examine the web site’s content, title and headline tags, incoming links from other sites and quite a bit more. The domain name’s keywords can affect search engine ranking, but if those domain name keywords carried a lot of weight sites like IBM.com would be penalized for not mentioning “computer” in the name.
So we can conclude that domain names do not need to be alphabetical or contain keywords of your business in order to achieve a higher ranking. Companies that sell domains often advocate keyword-seo-friendly domain names. Search engine expert Quadszilla (despite the anonymity truly a savvy SEO) advocates using keyword-hyphenated-domain-names for better search engine result pages. Yet his domain – seoblackhat.com – is not hyphenated. SEO guru Rand Fishkin gives the keyword-domain-name (with or without hyphens) a 1/5th of 1/3rd weighting, i.e., keywords in the domain are one of five factors that in total make up 30% importance in Google ranking.
So the keywords in the domain name have some weight, and the value of a hyphenated keyword domain is debatable.
Keywords in Domain Names
One place that domain keywords do make a difference is when the keywords the user enters are an exact match to your domain. Type in a dream kitchen to see what I mean. But I checked Google and Yahoo keyword tools for nh kitchen designer, and they report that no one is searching for exactly that phrase. So the domain nhkitchendesigner.com will not be of much use in obtaining higher search engine results.
Branding Your Domain Name
Last we have the issue of branding. Do you search for books at books.com or amazon.com? The use of descriptive phrases in your company name or domain becomes irrelevant in the face of good branding. Good branding raises positive awareness of your business in the hearts and minds of your public. When you create an image of your business as the resource for your target market the name of that business is part of the image. Prior to the success of Amazon.com, the word “Amazon” did not create an association to buying books. So if you will use excellent branding techniques for your business and your web site the business name will fuse with your popularity, but it will not create your popularity.
What Works on Google
Fishkin summarizes good Google search engine marketing. Yahoo and MSN are pretty easy by comparison. But Google drives as much traffic as Yahoo and MSN combined, so it can’t be ignored. The Google methods are, in essence, good branding. So if you want good search engine results in Google you will have to make your web site an authority site that has great content and that other, highly qualified sites link to. The name of your company / domain name becomes so small in this mix that the answer boils down to this:
- name your company and your domain according to what works in the offline world
- identify your target market
- write both offline and online magazine articles
- write a very focused blog
- answer very focused questions on forums
- employ the mechanical methods of SEO on your web site
Conclusion
In the end, your name will not drive traffic because of the name. It will drive traffic because your business and your name fuse to represent the logical place to go for the best answers to the problems you solve.
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