Picking your web address can seem like an overwhelming task, but it is it?

Today’s blog is short. I just want to highlight one variation on picking a website address and give one more factoid about this process.

Sometimes, business names have the opposite problem as the one we discussed yesterday. Sometimes your business has a short name like “Johnsons”. If so, you have probably already discovered that every variation of that name is long gone from the pickings list.

Now I want to elaborate just a bit about picking the name of your website. To pick a name for your site, sometimes it is best to not use your company name at all. Let’s say your company name is “Johnsons”. Let’s also assume that your company makes shoe boxes. If johnsons-shoeboxes.com is gone maybe we can try this method. Let’s think of a very short descriptive phrase like a tagline from a good movie. Let’s try something like johnjohns.com or shoeboxmaker.com or maybe johnsonboxes.com.

I will say this however, that if you are given a choise to put a dash between the descriptive words of your name I am starting to lean hard on the idea that is abetter choice. For example:

www.johnsonsshoeboxes.com might be better played as

www.johnsons-shoe-boxes.com.

There is a good reason for this. The second choice as above, is MORE optimized than the top version. What I mean to say, is that the bottom choice is is in reality three unique keywords. The top choice is one long word. It could be read in the search engines as two words: johnsons shoeboxes. The bottom choice however is more likely to be understood as “johnsons”, “shoe”, “boxes”, “johnsons shoe”, johnsons boxes”, “shoe boxes”. I am hoping that you are getting my point here. Just in case you are not getting it, I will put it as simple as possible. SEO is about using the maximum amount of keywords you can without being ridiculous about it.

Think about all the times you have to use the name of your website in your website coding. If the name of your website has good descriptive keywords or adjectives in it, then everytime you have to use that name in your website coding you are getting another point for those words in the SEO ranking game. If you settled on johnsons-shoe-boxes.com and have ten absolute links on your homepage then you already have ten instances of “shoe”, “johnsons”, and “boxes” on that page.

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