Stop Words, Domain Names, and the Googlebot

Question: Do keywords and stop words matter when it comes to me picking a domain name?

Your domain name is one of the most important things you will pick when you are a new start up company. There are several things to consider when picking your domain name.

• Can users remember your domain name?
• Is the url easy to say?
• Can it be interpreted differently?
• Is the domain name "an exact match"

When picking a new domain name, you want to pick something that is easy to remember. Your user should not have to have the companies business card in front of you to remember who the company name. We have all experience this; someone named their company xzyab.xxx and you can't remember it . One key factor to remember is use words that are easy to spell, easy to remember, and are made up of keywords. Try to stay with .com's as well over domains like.info, .net, etc.

Pick a domain name that is easy to say and rolls off the tongues smoothly. If you have to repeat it over and over while on the phone with a client, than you know there is any issue.

If you tell someone your domain name, is it going to interpreted differently? For example, your domain might be "blogger4u" but your user types "bloggerfouryou". Making your domain name easy to remember as well as easy to interpret are one in the same; you just need to do it.

If you are lucky, you can find a domain name that is an exact match to what the user might type into the search engine; but this is getting harder and harder as more domain names are being purchased. We call this EMDS domains; Exact Match Domains. If you do enough research and search long enough, you might be able to find one.

Stop words are words that are defined by bots to stop indexing upon reviewing them. If you don't know which words are stop words, do you research and find them. Using words such as I, a, and, etc... are stop words. Believe it or not, there are quite a few on the list. Do the research.

Keywords in your domain name can help you when getting indexed verses using stop words. Do try to include one to two keywords in the least in your domain name.

To some it up, yes according to the current research keywords and stop words, along with some of the other factors noted in this article do effect how your domain name is viewed. Doing the research and hiring a Web Master can help with making your site a success.