Hi. I’m a freelance designer who is just now running into the issues associated with purchasing suitable domains for my clients. Most of my work in the past has been redesigns of already existing sites. But now I have two completely-from-scratch jobs where there is no owned domain starting out.
I am working with Mary Smith, PhD (example). She checked and marysmith.com is taken. So she purchased marysmith.info. I told her that most people don’t even know that they can enter .info after a web address, so it is probably not a good solution.
I checked this morning and msmith.com is available. Am I correct in assuming that .info is a mistake? What about adding “phd” to the domain (msmithphd.com)? This should help with SEO, no?
Thanks in advance. I’m still kind of new to the wonderful world of domains.
marysmith.info would work well.
Think about how people will visit her site. They’ll either see her url on her business card or other papers or simply follow a link on google or on other sites.
Then once they’ve been once, to go back they’ll probably use their bookmarks or just type her name in google, and a .com or .info will be indexed just as well by google, no problem.
So going with the desired domain name with .info is better than an abbreviation using .com???
And how do the engines view the url? For instance, how does it know marysmithphd.com is relevant for the keywords “Mary Smith, PhD”? Without separators, I mean.
I guess this other thread on here has me a little confused as well. It seemed like people were advising that .com is almost always preferable.
What I mean is that the .info is clear and would work well.
But not better or worse than another one.
What is important is the in-page SEO, so it happens on your site’s title, body, etc.
The domain name is not important, only a little bit, very little and only in some cases.
So you’ll be fine with the .info but you could as well take a .com, just don’t think you have to , it’s just a personal choice.
Me I only take .com names and very rarely (only once) a .net
Thank you very much for the replies, BTW. But I think I would disagree a bit with your first assertion that most will either see a link or a biz card. This is a small biz owned by a pretty non-tech-savvy person. I think she will be using word of mouth a fair amount. And my fear is that people will hear what they want/are accustomed to (.com).
Is there a resource out there that discusses the specific weight domain plays in SEO?? Because I had always heard it was pretty important, and it sounds like you are saying it is not.
No, I’m saying that it has some weight in some cases (case being when it’s a premium domain name or it has keywords with a dash in url) in that case when people make a link to it, the anchor will have the keyword you’re targeting.
But apart from that, the most important of all is in-page SEO, since you can have totally unrelated domain name ranking first for keywords not in the domain name.
For some keywords, all the first page of google not one site has the keyword in the domain name.
So if most of the time she will tell the url by voice, then yes a .com will be the one to choose.
This depends largely on the type of website. If its just a bio site .info should be quite fine. If its an e-commerce business I would go with another .com.
I suppose you need to understand and remember that domain name should be as short as possible and the domain name should be memorable.
SEO is separated to the domain name and it can’t be hurt bu the domain name itself
Thank you for all the replies. I’m gonna go with the abbreviation with .com: msmith.com. I think that a shorter URL with the most familiar TLD will be the easiest for her potential clients.
I had a similar thing happen to a co-worker. Wait a few days and see if the domain becomes available. He and I discovered that if you keep looking to see if a name is available, it will get snapped up.
With all the domain registration services, this happens.