I know it’s been said many times, but I’m going to say it one more time – spending 10 minutes thinking about your blog’s Domain Name before you make your purchase is really important. Not only can it help with Search Engine Optimisation if your Domain Name includes important keywords for your site, but it also makes it easier for readers to remember your url and to also link to you.
For instance, the reason I chose Connected Internet as my domain name was because my original intention was to write about convergence and also because it is easy to remember. I even chose the blogging name ‘Everton’ as it’s quite unique and it allows me to leave comments as ‘Everton’ on almost any site, without people confusing me with another Everton.
I also went for a .co.uk url as I thought this would allow me to stand out from the crowd. I think this might have worked a bit, but I still think that if I’d gone for a .com url I would have got me more traffic overall and more Google love.
Dennis (sorry for using you as an example mate!) who has been submitting some great articles of late as part of the Connected Internet team, has just decided that getting a more memorable and relevant domain name is even worth moving his site. Fairly shortly he will be moving from the very memorable http://www.petersen-inc.dk to http://www.thebetanews.com.
Not only will this be easier to remember and more relevant for SEO, it will also be a lot easier to link to ‘Beta News’ within articles than to ‘Petersen Inc’. I can’t tell you how many times people have emailed me and asked have I read the latest post on their site, and I have to ask them to send their url because I can’t remember it. I feel quite bad having to do this as it gives the incorrect impression that I don’t read their site, even though I do but via RSS where I don’t need to remember the url.
Dennis is going to be quite busy as he’s also setting up another new site that will be launched later this year, based on an idea I sent him via email. He’s also going to be kicking off Beta News with a new series called ‘What’s On Your Desktop, xxx?’ which will hopefully give some insights into the applications that people use on their PCs and why. The series will be kicked off with ‘What’s On Your Desktop, Everton Blair?’, so keep a look out for Dennis’ new site.
If you have a bad url and a fairly young site, I would encourage you to consider getting a new url. Even if you have a more established url, a move can still be completed successfully without any loss of backlinks and Page Rank if you do it properly and notify Google.
