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| Domain Name Extensions (Photo credit: The Booklight) |
Last week at work, two magazine designers were asking me for my view on the length of the domain names they were having to use on the page designs for the print magazines they were working.
Their challenge was that the domain names for the companion websites of the magazines were getting to be too long to fit onto the printed pages. This was giving them design challenges.
It so happened that the week before I had put two new domain names into action using the new gTLDs (Generic Top Level Domains) which drastically shortened the domains for the two companion websites I edit. Instead of www.acrtoday.co.uk and www.heat-pumps-today.co.uk as the domains I use in the printed magazines, I now use the following domains, www.acr.today and www.heatpumps.today, respectively.
The first reason for using these new domains was to make them easier to remember for our readers. The secondary benefit is that the designers find them easier to insert into their print designs.
But, there is more to it than just making them shorter.
Good practice changes
In the recent past, it was good SEO practice to use what is called ‘exact match domain names’ in your website address, such as, if you were an accountancy firm, using relevant keywords such as ‘tax’ and ‘accountancy’ to make up the URL ‘taxaccountancy.co.uk’. Using a domain like this would give your website a boost because the search engines found it easier to understand what your website was about.
Of course, if you were not quick enough to get the domains using a single keyword, such as ‘bread.co.uk’ or ‘hotel.com’, then you had to opt for something longer, like ‘whitebread.co.uk’ or ‘cheaphotel.com’.
Soon enough, you would have to buy a domain name with hyphens in it to have a sniff of benefitting from the keywords so you would see more and more websites with domains like ‘white-bread.co.uk’ or ‘tax-accountancy.co.uk’ or ‘cheap-hotel-london.co.uk’.
More selective search engines
The search engine people soon realised that often the websites with domains containing numerous keywords (and hyphens) were not always good quality websites, merely websites stuffed with keywords in the domains and in the pages.
Fairly recently, search engines have started to lower the importance of keywords in domain names, particularly those with several keywords and hyphens in them.
Make the most of the new gTLDs
Going back to the first point about the designers asking about domain names and how they could make them more succinct. Exact match domain names are very useful still. They make domains easier to remember and can shorten the length of them quickly. They are still good SEO practice if used correctly. They can be useful offline too.
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