The name you choose for your company website is something requiring a deal of thought.Thought not least about how you plan to publicise your site once it goes live. (See Searching, sort of searching and finding)
1. Search Engine Friendly Names.
Keyword based names are
issue here. A good example of this is newly mooted entertainmentcyprus.com. It was on Google’s first page within first 24 hours of being published using key phrase “entertainment in Cyprus” – search engines drop words like “in”, “and” and “but” from search strings. Remember that your name or name of your company is not necessarily a keyword unless people are likely to search for you by your name. People like Chanel and Nike for example.
Further, I find that as time goes by issue of “Search Engine Slavery” begins increasingly to annoy me. We are approaching a situation where a website owner will be compelled to design his site to meet Google’s SEO demands, before forking over a fortune every month for Google Ad words to get him found. Then doubtless owner will be click frauded out of lot by a little old lady in Pakistan and then get go home with nothing. (Read about click-fraud here - http://www.lookerscy.com/CMS/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=2)
Let’s make no bones about value of a well-placed entry on Google or its competitors, it is a big plus. But how much must we cough up to maintain a fickle, unreliable and inconsistent “here today and gone tomorrow” presence on various engines?
Too much say I.
2. Human Friendly Names.
These are names that “mean something” and rely more on memory of searcher for results rather than “cold” searching. A Lookers client was trying to find a name for his taxi company website, but wanted to avoid keyword rich but rather bland taxiforcyprus type of identity. Likewise, use of numbers in names has a certain vogue just now – taxi4cyprus for example – but this type of pun only works in English language. A French viewer can translate an HTML site on Babel fish (http://babelfish.altavista.com) and read about what your company offers in a selection of languages - but URL is not translatable, and translation software is not, at this time, pun sensitive anyway!
