It’s always interesting to get a non-domainer perspective on domains.
Certainly values of domains ultimately depend in large part to end users.
The Wall Street Journal Blog had a discussion on selecting domain names for an end users site.
They had several do’s and don’ts:
“””””””- Include keywords in your business name, when possible. (Jon’s Bicycles, for instance, is better than Jon’s Equipment or even possibly Jon’s Cycling.)
– Don’t choose a word or phrase that is highly competitive on search engines, unless you’re ready for an uphill and expensive battle to compete for it. And don’t use generic words (like Tiger), if they’re unrelated to your business or what you sell.
– Don’t use three-letter acronyms, like UPS or DEP.
– Add your location in your name if you’re only serving a local market, but don’t limit yourself with a location if you plan to expand.
– Don’t change your name just to make it SEO friendly. Changing a name offers a whole new set of business challenges, and may actually hurt your search-engine optimization at least short term.”””””””
Personally I don’t get the advice against using three letter domains, nor do I understand why they would recommend not dealing in domains that are highly competitive in the search engine, however you cannot disregard this, since unfortunately, many more end users that read the WSJ than this blog
Of course, the Wall Street Journal uses WSJ.com. Do as I say, not as I do…
Do as I say, not as I do… – Nice One LOL
IBM may have a differing opinion on this.
Nice find, and funny that it says you should not use three-letter domains, although the WSJ itself is using, well, WSJ.com. 🙂
My only comment is What the Bleep does a wallstreet journal writer know about our business?
Oh of course I know they have been right on the leading edge of the most valuable asset class in history?
Next they will tell us that rembrandts are on the sidewalk for peanuts. Pay no attention to these people they don’t have a clue.
Jeff
That is easy to say but you must realize that the Journal pulls a large audience of readers, who also have no clue.
People believe what they read so these words will have impact in the general public and perception is reality.
Most of the most brilliant, creative people of our generation and others have always gone against the popular notion accepted by the masses.
If you want mediocrity it is available to all. Think outside the box, it can be most rewewqarding.
The tips are NOT written by somoene from WSJ. The person writing the article used information from the following site.
We offered up some general tips about naming a business before. But here are some dos and don’ts from YourSEOPlan.com on finding a search-friendly name:
I ‘m glad a major newspaper is even writing about the advantages of domain names. Their logic revolves around the world of Google and search optimization and not direct navigation. The Journal’s basic understanding of our business, though championed, still leaves us domainers in “the know” and still on top of our game. We are and will be more successful because of it.
Well at least they got some of the SEO information correct….its worth the read.
Congrats WSJ:)
Mike
But maybe WSJ is saying from the perspective of small businesses as it is corect that a LLL domain is not very SEO friendly unless they have fairly large number of hite. Anyway very small businesses cannot afford LLL domain these days.
I second Sidharth on this, LLL.com’s are not very search n seo friendly -:)
It just goes to prove that no one really reads what they are writing, and sometimes they don’t even write what they are writing. Any real research on a subject is simply too much work.
Hope their wrong as I have His.com on sale on eBay starting tonight!
obviously the writer had NO IDEA what he was writing about.
Anyone who says LLLs are not SEO friendly doesn’t know too much about SEO.
You have a much better chance of ranking with wlf.com than with weightlossformula.com, because google knows that lll’s are hard to get and nobody will “burn” a lll on a spammy site.
the length of the domain name DOES play a role in seo, the shorter the better, given everything is else.
And yes, in case of LLL, the brevity is even more relevant than keywords (unless you have a single keyword domain like weightloss.com or diet.com)
Ken, His.com is seriously good domain. I recommend it. My only point is for end user to get LLL is costly affair unless he has content & traffic for it. Geo specific or generic domain help ingetting natural traffic. anyways best of luck for the sale.
Jeff, it is not that ” LLL.com’s are not very search seo friendly ” it is that LLL.tld are too friendly! Let’s say you own the domain LLL.com. If someone enters LLL in a search engine they will get millions of hits and only 1 to a few related to your LLL.com. That is unless you want to make your LLL.com (WSJ, IBM, UPS, HP etc) so well know that everyone will know your LLL as a branded name.
Of course that will take millions of dollars to do! As the article suggests, better to use BrooklynPizzaPlace.com then BPP.com!
Exactly. my thoughts are same
Weightlossformula turns up in Google as a spam word so you have to enter one of those squirmy words to continue. Then it returns 12,000 hits.
Weight-loss-formula turns 198,000 hits (better to use hyphens in domain names that have keywords) and wlf returns 984,ooo hits (too many)! So this TLA (three letter acronym) will not work even if that is a TLA of your business as other businesses may have the same TLA too (again, unless you have well branded that TLA into people’s memories)!
Wikipedia adds this (nothing about weight loss formula): WLF is an abbreviation that may stand for:
West Liberty Foods, a meat processing company in Iowa
The Williams-Landel-Ferry model for expressing the temperature dependence of liquid viscosity
Filename extension for a ‘WinBackup File Extension Library’ file, for example “example.wlf”
Filename extension for a ‘Mentor Graphics ModelSim’ (digital logic simulation application) file. In this context, wlf is short for ‘wave log format’
Washington Legal Foundation
Domainer – I am not sure how your LLL will get search friendly when people are actually looking for a brandname, let’s say the brand name is “Loud Beats Music” or “Loud Beats” in this case I don’t think your “LBM.com” or “LB.com” site will show up high in results until and unless you have keywordly optimized it.
Only if people know your brand well like “LBM” or “LB” then I doubt they will need any seo help in the first place..
– Never listen to generic advice for your unique business. Followers are never leaders.
For small business, there is some wisdom in the advice. For big business, no. Eighty percent of the top 500 brands in the world are distinctive branded one words such as Toyota, Microsoft, and Disney. Why? One reason is you cannot brand a descriptive words such as automobile, software, and entertainment.
Descriptive domain is still the best..short and sweet-get to the point
MD nails it for advice. Get advice custom-made for your business.
On another note, I have been a little concerned about WSJ lately. First of all, they represent a… ummm… collapsing business sector. Second of all, they’re sounding a little shrill pointing out “the bad things” in other business sectors.
Third of all, their writers are seemingly not reading their articles for logical statements. “Don’t buy three character domains like UPS.com and DEP.com?”
I’ll bet you everyone who read that knew immediately what company UPS.com was. You should be so lucky. I’d love to own SC.com and be so successful in my marketing that my readers knew that this 2 letter domain meant “successclick.com”.
I think everyone connected with the stock market at the moment are taking too many meds to help them pass by the pain in the coming weeks.