Internet Domain Names - Is Shorter domains names Really Better?

I've recently had a discussion with a friend of mine who is an SEO expert and Internet marketer. I found myself, to my surprise, on the other side of an argument I had long held a strong belief in. I had always told clients and anyone interested in registering a domain name for their business to find the shortest domain name possible, while still being relative to their product or service. This made perfect sense to me, as it does to many others. The shorter domain name the more likely someone was to type it into their browser correctly and arrive at your website. There are many other advantages that I would typically list, such as memory recollection and word of mouth promotion for short domain name , but the biggest is ease of use for short domain name. Well, as I said, the other day I found myself on the other side of the fence.

The discussion began as an SEO, or search engine optimization debate. My friend made a point that search engines treat keywords that are held within the domain name itself in higher regard than those same domain names used in content located on a website. That made some sense to me. In further exploring the implications of this, we arrived at an extreme example (theoretical) of a domain name consisting of a string of relevant keywords for an industry or service, which potentially used all of the 67 characters allowed in a registered a domain name. In theory, that domain name could be quickly moved up the rankings of search engines, with relatively little content backing it in the body of the website. While neither of us thought this was a good idea for anything other than the academic discussion we intended, it did start me thinking about the reasons for holding on to my "shorter is better for domain names" belief.

If the reason for the shorter domain name is to appeal to the human type of visitor to your site, does this not overlook the second most valuable visitor to your website, the search engines? A search engine does not care about the brevity of your domain name. And further, a shorter domain name that has no real keyword relevance may actually detract from your appeal to a search engine, in some measurement metrics. So, to carry the discussion a little further; is catering to our human imperfections worth sacrificing the potential advantage of a built-in relevant keyword in our domain name? And all of this doesn't even take into account the ways in which our methods of accessing Internet content has changed. I mean, how many of us still visit a website simply because it was easy to remember? Typically search engine results, auto fill-in browsers and favorites that we've added to our toolbars are how we now get to the content we want. Granted, nothing beats a short, catchy name that is easy to remember like Google or eBay, but this is the world we now live in. There are very few of these short domain names and memorable domain names names left. We must come up with ever more creative ways to represent our businesses on the Internet with domain names that are not as succinct as we might like. So, off I go to register the domain name; SEO Content Writing Value Online Insurance Ecommerce Expert dot com is the domain ame. Wish me luck.

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