Branding Revisited

If branding is a consideration or you plan to tell people about your site on the phone or in person, hyphenated domains are harder to verbalize. So https://rohitseo.wordpress.com would be www dot seo hyphen gold dot com which isn’t too bad, but imagine a domain with multiple hyphens, doesn’t exactly role off the tongue!! Fortunately there is a solution, register a non-hyphenated version as well and refer to it on company letterheads, traditional advertising media etc… and redirect the non-hyphenated domain to the hyphenated domain via a 301 redirect.

A words of warning regarding multiple domains. A simple 301 redirect will not be treated negative by the search engines, but having two identical sites (called mirror sites) might. If you plan to have two or more sites about the same subject make the content different. Changing the background colour or a few images, does not make a site different, you need unique text. If you can’t create unique sites, don’t make mirror sites, you might get your main business site penalized!! With our site we currently only advertise online so have no need for a second easier to verbalize non-hyphenated domain name, so we haven’t registered alternatives (as it happens https://rohitseo.wordpress.com was already taken anyway). However, we do plan to add an element of branding to this site long term which is why we went with the business/domain name Seotutorials, it’s memorable (so brandable) and has at least one keyword (Search engine optimization). We could have registered a name like “SEO Search Online Company”, but this is completely unbrandable as no one will recall a generic name like that, but would be great in terms of keywords since all four words are used by searches looking for SEO Services. If branding isn’t important (say an affiliate site) a generic keyword rich domain name is advisable. In essence with https://rohitseo.wordpress.com we have created a web site that is both brandable and easier to optimize.

Thanx for visiting!

Rohit Mehra