Glad you’re enjoying the blog!

At the end of the day your choice of domains will probably come down to usability–something short and sweet that people can remember and, in a blue sky world, has a keyword or two But always, always consider your target audience (humans) first and the machine (search engines) second. Remember too that your domain name does not have to match your actual trade name (business name used in your marketing collateral/graphics/etc) exactly. It can be a shorter version.

For e.g. my business trade name is “snap! web marketing solutions” but my domain name is snapwebmarketing.com To use my entire trade name in the domain would have been WAY too cumbersome to type into a browser, to tell people in conversation, and to remember period

HTH,
Karri

I find your information helpful. I’m in the process of searching for a designer to build my website. I have a long name for my business and I would like to know if you’d suggest I purchase another domain with the acronyms to keep it short and simple? Then, I could have the designer use the acronym to point to my site. The only problem is I just had my business cards printed with the the business name. Not sure if the buying the shorter name domain will help me.

Some of your advices I already knew, but it’s good to read them again.

“It’s a downright irresponsible business practice carried out by consultants and designers who either can’t be bothered to educate their clients or don’t understand online business fundamentals (but pretend they do).”

I couldn’t agree more with your affirmation. This is the main reason, I think, why things like this happen.

Eugen

Personally, I don’t like hyphens because they’re clumsy to say (to clients, prospects, in a video/audio, whatever). But for SEO purposes, using a hyphen (or not) might be a different story. i.e. if you do a search on “lethbridge-consultants” and then do a search on “lethbridgeconsultants” you get what I would consider better quality search results in Google on the hyphenated version. So Google definitely “notices” the hyphen. (I live in Lethbridge so just tried that key phrase for argument’s sake!).

Of course, the disclaimer here is that URLs really only matter to SEO (in any measurable way that’s worth thinking about IMO) insofar that you’re concerned about the anchor text pointing back to your site.

If the domain is for a core / main site for a business / corporate entity, I’d go withOUT the hyphen. In fact, I always regret that I put a hyphen in my own URL because it’s just clumsy when someone asks for my website URL. Though I do have snapva redirected to snap-va

Karri… how do you feel about hyphens in domain names? domain-name.com