What’s in a name? In business, everything, and though “by any other name would smell as sweet” a business has more chances of becoming profitable if its name is catchy, memorable and strong. Think Coca-Cola, Xerox, Nike, Sony, Ford,  and so many others.

But let’s think online companies, since this is our main business environment. Think Google, Twitter, Facebook, Digg. Would these companies be as successful with other names, more descriptive? Hardly.

Yet many online businesses consider branding a form of satisfying the search engines first. Many business names today are highly descriptive – focused on keywords rather than people. The “dot.com” era created the annoying branding habit of adding a .com at the name too. Expedia has ditched the .com from its name, but there are a number of sites that still keep it, the few that survived the dot.com crash.

Choosing a name for an online business is a challenging proposition. It’s hard to stand out from the crowd without a good name. Things become even harder when the brand has to match a domain name – and to protect a business against brand jacking, this is obviously a must.

You can start a business plan without the business name, but you cannot launch the business without the brand that will make it stand out. There are rare cases of re-branding that involve name-changing, but more often than not, changing a name does not make a business better known – in fact, it could obscure previous branding efforts.

• The easy way would be to acquire naming software like WordMaker. But this is not enough. In addition to using a name generator software, you have to research  the market and make sure that the name you chose is not already in use by other company.
• Here is where Trademarkia can help – the largest visual search engine for more than 6 million trademarked logos, names, and slogans on the Internet. They also provide, for a fee, trade mark registration services, legal advice and more.
• To avoid the hassle, you could hire a brand naming professional, and there are plenty swimming in the pond.
• VAYTON Brand Capital for example, is interesting because, aside naming services, they also offer an international intellectual property (IP) management platform.
• The Brand Institute is probably the less affordable solution, as it’s working with the “heavy industry players.” You’ll find names like Alcatel, AT&T, Avon, BP, Black&Decker and many others in their portfolio.
• Nomen is quite a name too… having worked with the likes of Lancôme, Microsoft, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, Renault and more. Even their own brand is a strong testimony.
• CatchWord Branding specialize in all aspects of brand name development, including product and company naming, brand strategy, initial legal screening, and linguistic analysis.
• You can even crowdsource your brand name, with services like crowdSPRING.

Whatever option you choose, the moment you have a name you like, you need to check that it is not already in use by others – to avoid trademark issues and copyright infringement trials. If the name is available, you’ll need to book the matching domain. With names no one else has, this should be relatively easy. Don’t postpone this: you’d be surprised to see how fast the domain you need can be booked by someone else after you performed an online search for available domains.

Last but not least, register your brand. It’s not that expensive, and it instantly makes your business more valuable.

Post image by Orin Zebest

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1. Colorize Your Brand – How Color Builds Your Brand
2. 15.4 Tips to Brand Your Domain Name
3. How to Watermark Your Images and PDF Files for Brand Awareness and Copyright Protection

If you are serious about your new website, you understand that your domain name is going to be your brand name, so think twice before you register one. A while ago I wrote a post on this topic giving some practical tips how to create or brand your domain name. And now a follow up to this – no matter how much you may like your newly invented domain name, you should first check if there are no hidden issues that might be invisible at the moment. I usually use 4 tricks to make sure I am going to have no problems with a domain name:

1. Google for it:

• search for both [domainname] and [domain name] to see if Google considers it a typo; if yes – that’s a bad sign. Bare in mind, that each time a surfer who already knows about you but uses Google to reach you [and you will be surprised to see how many people actually search Google for a domain name instead of going directly to the site] and sees that did-you-mean-x message, you risk losing a valuable visitor who really meant to find you. All your branding efforts can come to nothing just because you’ve overlooked this tiny detail.
• search for [domain name] to evaluate how hard that will be for you to manage your brand/reputation. For example, tourwiki.com looks nice if you are planning a nice site on traveling but cannot be branded effectively just because if you search for ‘tour wiki‘, you see en.wikipedia.org [yeah, quite naturally] at the top – can you compete with it? Probably, not.

2. Check what your domain name may be associated with. Ebay is a good way to search for word associations. I also often check urban dictionary to make sure the word has no negative connotation in the Internet, school or urban slang. [did you know that 'lex' means 'Rolex', well, maybe you did, but it simply never occurred to me ]

3. Make sure both plural and singular forms are available and better register both. You don’t want to let your direct visitors go to your competitor who is a lucky owner of domainnameS.com (pl) website while you own domainname.com (sg), do you?

This won’t take you more than 5 minutes to use the tips above but let me tell you – it’s much better to try to foresee potential problems than find out about them when it’s already too late: your website is live, has accumulated some links and enjoys its natural growth.

Post image credits: Got Names

Related posts:

1. Keywords in Domain Names? Yes, Definitely!
2. 15.4 Tips to Brand Your Domain Name

Suppose you are planning a website. You already know what it will be about and now what? Yeah, you need to name it. And that’s where you first get into trouble. You might want your site name to contain your main keyword and most obviously you find that all the hot catchy names are already taken. So what to do? Here are some helpful tips and resources:

1. Use already branded ideas (one of my favorites):
seomoz.com (Dmoz.com)
porntube.com (Youtube.com)

The obvious advantage of this approach lies in adding a fixed positive association to your domain name. Consider this, everyone knows and trusts Dmoz and thus by adding -moz to your domain name you get people to trust your new website.

2. Make up new words by adding suffixes:

2.1. Add -ster (very popular): catster.com, dogster.com, friendster.com
2.2. Add a verb forming suffix -ize/-ise: fashionising.com, colourize.com
2.3. Add Latin adjectival suffix -cus: eventicus.com
2.4. Use adjective suffixes
-matic: podomatic.com (podcasts)
-ful: eventful.com
-able: fundable.com

3. An advanced version of the above two: take a well known website name, add your keyword and add a suffix - gamediggity.com

4. Add suffix -er and drop e (also very popular):
talkr.com
socialtrackr.com

5. Go even further: add -er, drop e and make it plural:
sweeprs.com (from sweepstakes)

6. Take advantage of .us top level domain:
thumblicio.us
flickrlicio.us

7. Invent the suffixes of your own:
searchles.com
URLex.info

8. Split your keyword with another word:
mapeire.com (map + empire)
motortopia.com (motor + utopia)

9. Add one letter before your keyword (also must have been invented by Dmoz):
Dcomments.com
furl.net

10. Invent a new word which looks familiar to an existing word (a risky one):
SiteBar.org (sidebar)
wepublic.com (republic)

11. Add your targeted territory name + use any method from above: filipinofriendsterworld.com

12. Drop a letter in the middle of your keyword:
Sk-rt.com

13. Rhyme your keyword:
Flyspy.com

14. Play with your keyword plural form (a bit overused method):
-x instead of -cs: topix.net
-z instead of -s: clickz.com

15. Use an advanced option of the above method: add -z instead of regular -s and add any vowel in the end: piczo.com

16. (also using the 15th one) use your keyword twice (singular + (changed) plural): picpix.com

Things to keep in mind while searching for a domain name:
- Plan ahead: think how easily your new domain name will be branded. Learn from the best: wikitravel.org (from wikipedia.org), Mozbers (SeoMoz + Members), etc.
- Try to avoid potential misspellings (can be referred to the 15th and 11th, for example).
- Make sure your domain name is easily spelled (can be referred to the 5th one)
- Try this tool which can be a real fun.

Related posts:

1. 4 Things To Check Before You Register A Domain Name
2. Keywords in Domain Names? Yes, Definitely!
3. Brand Naming Online – a Double Challenge

Focusing on your targeted keywords in the domain name is rather a disputable question. Yet domain name optimization has proved to be highly effective in terms of rankings. Suffice it to say that in some cases (especially when dealing with long tail and when combined with couple of other favorable factors) key-phrase-based domain name can turn even more important than:

1/ top-level domain;
2/ backlinks;
3/ page rank (if it still can influence rankings in any way);
4/ quality content.

Furthermore, relevant domain name can work magic with Google, Yahoo and MSN. That’s one of those few features that unites the three major search engines.

Let’s not talk small, let’s just look into SERPs first. Nothing works better and more reassuring than examples. So I will start over with them. Look here:

Google results for: football ticket prices (Google screen shot here)
Yahoo results for: football ticket prices (Yahoo screen shot here)
MSN results for: football ticket prices (MSN screen shot here)

Do you see anything in common? Bingo! While showing rather varying results, all three search engines agree upon the first place – www.footballticketprices.co.uk – let’s look deeper:

1/ FIRST result for US with co.uk top-level domain (well, the site is hosted in the US, New York, to be fair – and Google claims it looks into both factors when filtering results);

2/ 0 (yes, zero) Google links and a few minor Yahoo links (most of them from us discussing this case on dp forum) – and yes, some of the links do have relevant anchor text “- Football Ticket Prices -” (just the same as the page title)
NOTE: the second result in G has 10,300 G links – well, no clearly defined anchor text preferences but there are inlinks with “Purchase football tickets“, “NFL Football tickets” and “Buy Discount Football Tickets“;

3/ PR2 (with PR6 following it);

4/ Home page content has not been updated since 06 Feb 2007; this type of text meets me right in the middle of the page:
“Warning: fopen(/home/james/public_html/cutenews/data/news.txt) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: Permission denied in /home/james/public_html/cutenews/inc/functions.inc.php on line 177″

home james public_html
james public_html cutenews

are the two most frequently used terms on the page (with density of 4.90%).

Here your most obvious question should be,

“So all I need to get top 10 in Google is to register a relevant domain name?”

“Well, now I should refer you to the beginning of the article. To make it clear, that’s NOT SOLELY the domain name. The most important factor which worked like a charm is the perfect match of search query+title+anchor text+domain name. And let’s not forget about low competition for this long tail key phrase which made it possible.”

So, what we should remember while choosing the domain name:
- keyword based domain name is perfect for branding: it will be easily remembered as it is associated with your niche;
- search engines still look at domain names as a factor of relevancy;
- people will link to your website with the site name in the anchor text (so if your site name is keyword based – the anchor text will also be relevant);
- a keyword-based domain name can boost your ranking with relatively slight on- and off-site efforts.

Another example:

Google results for: copywriting service

Questions which still remain unclear:

- Do hyphenated keywords in the domain name work better? Or do they work at all? – Note, none of my examples had hyphenated key phrases as the first result.
- Does Google look for exact match in the anchor text? So do we need to focus on one anchor text only or do we need to vary it? – The second one looks better to me but seems to work less effectively.
- Is Google going to devalue the domain name importance? – Well, probably, as this makes it vulnerable to web spam, but I don’t think that it will remove this factor completely.

Related posts:

1. 4 Things To Check Before You Register A Domain Name
2. 15.4 Tips to Brand Your Domain Name
3. My Google’s Addiction : Sorry Guys, but I Do Love Google Search