I had a conversation with someone who felt it very important to establish his organization’s brand. While he was correct in this objective for the proposed website, the matter of the URL (web address or domain name) is a different story.
What do I mean?
If the brand is many words (as this person’s brand is), it isn’t very user friendly or search engine friendly to choose a domain name that includes only the first letter of several of the words of the brand. Neither people nor search engines are mind readers.
It makes much more sense to choose a URL with real words that are part of the brand. Then, of course the full brand is featured the moment someone lands on the home page of the website.
Let’s take an imaginary example to clarify this:
Suppose your organization is: Left-Handed People for Promoting Reading Literacy — obviously you wouldn’t want a URL that long.
If this is your brand, you might think of getting the URL www.lhpfprl.com — which would be meaningless to most people and very difficult to remember besides not providing any keywords for the search engines.
Or you might get www.lhprpreadingliteracy.com and this would have the keywords “reading literacy,” which would be good, but it would still be very hard to understand or remember.
The best solution is to try to get something such as www.promotingreadingliteracy.com or www.readingliteracy.com.
Then the moment someone lands on the home page the organization name is front and center: Left-Handed People for Promoting Reading Literacy.
When optimizing your website to be both user friendly and search engine friendly, you should think from the point of view of other people (as well as the point of view of the search engines) rather than from your own point of view.
(c) 2010 Miller Mosaic, LLC
Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) and her business partner Yael K. Miller (@MillerMosaicLLC on Twitter) are committed to taking the mystery out of social media so that individuals and companies can utilize the power of social media to attract more business. See our Quick Start Social Media Track.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Phyllis .. you manage to make a tricky subject understandable .. so often we get tied up in our own thoughts and forget that others are looking at our site from their perspective.
So your analogy here is straight forward and easy to comprehend.
Thanks – Hilary
Hilary –
Thanks so much for this nice comment — I really appreciate it. And, yes, Yael and I are always striving to make things easy for others to comprehend.
Phyllis