Ideas for naming your site
Submitted by Kudos on Sun, 06/08/2008 - 12:50.
Jeremy or any other experts,
Anyone got any quick tips to naming a domain when searching for a domain name? Plus is there anything wrong in having domain names that have dashes ie best-travel-places.com if your idea is gone.
Cheers
James
p.s I can't stand it finding wasted domain names that are parked or hosting links.. arggh!
people generally won't
people generally won't include dashes when typing in a URL they think they remember, so the non-dashed domain name has that advantage. while dashed names are easier to read, the general consensus is that non-dashed are better if you can find them.
on the other hand, be sure to use dashes in the paths that make up your on-site URLs, as dashes are treated as whitespace by at least Google when indexing. that's not as apparent with underscores.
also, best-travel-places is highly generic. you should use something closer to your chosen niche, which i'm sure can't be best travel spots worldwide. if it is, you should narrow it.
Stephen Carter
creator of Review Foundry
hyphens and underscores
on the other hand, be sure to use dashes in the paths that make up your on-site URLs, as dashes are treated as whitespace by at least Google when indexing. that's not as apparent with underscores.
Google treats hyphens and underscores equally and has done since last year.
I would still use dashes/hyphens in URLs, though, because if someone prints your page and the links are underlined they won't know whether the link contains a space or an underscore.
Plus other search engines may not treat underscores as spaces.
Actually Google does not yet
Actually Google does not yet read underscores as word separators. Stick with dashes.
Read Matt Cutt's blog here:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/whitehat-seo-tips-for-bloggers/
Matt Says on: August 10, 2007
If you read Stephan Spencer’s write-up, he says some people thought that underscores are the same as dashes to Google now, and I didn’t quite say that in the talk. I said that we had someone looking at that now. So I wouldn’t consider it a completely done deal at this point. But note that I also said if you’d already made your site with underscores, it probably wasn’t worth trying to migrate all your urls over to dashes. If you’re starting fresh, I’d still pick dashes.
For affiliate sites, choose
For affiliate sites, choose a name, without hyphens or underscores, which is as relevant to your site as possible without being too long. You should also consider registering the hypenated version of the domain so your competitors can't use it.
Alternatively, you could choose any name you want and build a brand around so it becomes synonymous with the product(s) you sell (like amazon) it but that will take more time and money.
Thanks all valid points
Thanks all valid points indeed. Agree with the points around building the brand. Just want to be sure that the giant search monster won't penalise me for placing the hypens in when doing PPC.
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