When many people start a company, they aren’t thinking of the search engines when they name it. This is a mistake.

Taking into account branding, relevant keywords, and location are important.

It’s a good idea to take a list of names you’re thinking of and run them and some other related searches into Google. With more and more people actually using Google instead of a URL to find web sites, if you don’t rank high for your own name, you will lose a lot of traffic.

Naming it after your own name may be good if you have a unique last name, but if you’re a Smith or a Williams, it might be a better idea to come up with something else.

Of course, having a company name and domain name as the same thing is optimal. If you can find a short, .com domain name that you’re comfortable with as your company’s name, then you’re basically assured of ranking high for it. Branding is very important. Google, Amazon, eBay, and Yahoo don’t say anything about what the sites do.

However, if I were starting a small site today, the last thing I would name it would be Amazon. Anybody searching for “amazon” would run into a boatload of information about the river.

Locations are sometimes available that can be handy for searches within a city. If you’re starting a laundry business and there’s no one else called “San Fernando Laundry,” then it might be good to name your company that, and even take the .com (it is available by the way). Domain names don’t hold as much Google juice as the site’s name, but if you can get it, take it.

Anything that will lead to people linking back to your site with relevant text is a good thing. A lot of people may search for “san fernando laundry” and if people link back to you with that text, you will rank well for it.

Another note: make sure the name is memorable. It doesn’t do much good to have a unique title for your site if no one remembers it. Best to keep it short and make sure it’s easy to spell.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 11:15 pmand is filed under Search Engine Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.