Choosing the Domain Name of Your Dreams - Points of Contention
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Drop the question of whether you should have keywords in your domain name into any SEO forum and you’ll probably inspire some lively debate. It won’t reach the religious proportions of the Mac vs. PC vs. open source arguments we’ve all heard ad nauseum, but there does seem to be at least two schools of thought. One is convinced that Google gives extra weight to your domain name when they’re indexing your site, so you’re more likely to get into a top spot in the SERPs for your chosen keywords if at least one of them is in your domain name. The other thinks that other factors are far more important.
Certainly it isn’t an absolute necessity to put keywords in your domain name. Where, oh where, are the keywords in Amazon, eBay, Google, and many other top sites? That brings us to the opposite side of argument. There are those that insist that keywords don’t belong in your domain name; rather, you should try to create a name that can be branded. Build the appropriate content on your site, and you’ll soon be known for whatever you’re promoting; your name will eventually become synonymous with your business. The best example of this is Google itself; “googling” has been accepted into more than one dictionary as a verb meaning “to search for something online using the search engine Google.” But the word “google” meant nothing before the company was born.
It’s possible to find some middle ground, however. Think about what someone would expect to find on a site with your domain name. Certain well-known web sites do a good job with this; it’s pretty obvious that HotMail offers email accounts, CareerBuilder caters to job seekers, and LendingTree’s target market is people looking for loans (the “tree” part at least implies home loans). Each of those sites includes a keyword, but adds something to give it some branding potential – something to make it stand out a little from the crowd.
The key point is to make your domain name unique. If you want to stand out in your visitors’ minds, you need to be different – but not so different that your domain name seems to have nothing whatsoever to do with your site. Google’s name was inspired by the word googol, a term for a very large number, one followed by 100 zeroes. It was chosen to imply the immense amount of data that Google indexes – and it’s probable that the spelling was changed to make it easier to remember.
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