URL SEO: CHOOSING AN SEO FRIENDLY URL FOR YOUR BUSINESS
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The discovery and deployment of SEO keywords is critical throughout your website, and there is no better place to start then in your URL address. URLs (or domain names) are important because they are the first text that a search engine reads at your website. A URL-friendly SEO name should be catchy and descriptive for your customers. Some of these URL SEO names are so powerful that tens of millions of dollars have been paid over the years for very powerful names such as: business.com, diamond.com, beer.com and sex.com. Each of these names denotes prestige ofownership that accompanies it, and certainly their names leave little doubt as totheir business. 
Using Keywords in a URL
The first question that always seems to come upwhen picking a good SEO URLaddress is: have all of the good SEO friendly URL address names have already been taken? The answer really depends on your business. What is the focus of your business? Are you national or locally focused? Do you have a lot of competitors or are you specialized? For example, if you are a bankruptcy attorney working nationally, you might be limited in your choices; but if you are a bankruptcy attorney practicing in Prescott Arizona, then you have a great variety of options. Why? Because one of the SEO keywords you can utilize in your name can include your geography such as Prescott, Arizona. In this instance, you are obviously not going to find www.bankruptcylawyer.com but you have a better chance of claiming www.prescottbanktruptcylawyer.com. Again, it depends largely on your competition and target geography.Using Dashes and Periods
What if you cannot find a good SEO URL name like www.bankruptcylawyer.com; are you still out of options? Not really. Most search engines consider the dashes and periods separating keywords as spaces, so this can allow you to be far more creative with your keywords. Ideally, you don’t want to use more than three keywords in a URL name. Using the previous example, you can also use www.presott-bankruptcy-lawyer.com as an alternative. By doing a thorough keyword analysis of your own, you will have a better idea of the keywords for your URL and what is available for use.
Use a .com or .Something Else
With all the various right-of-the-dot URL addresses now available, it can be tempting to select a more obscure “.biz” or something other than a .com ending in order to find a good domain name to the left-of-the-dot. Is this a good idea? It depends what you plan to do with it. Are you going to use it as your email address? How about your collateral and name dropping? The bottom line is, when most people hear domain names, they assume .com on the end of it. So if you plan to utilize it as part of your branding strategy, just make sure you know what that means. Moreover, you don’t want to buy beer.biz if you want to compete with beer.com, it will only help your competitor.
Existing URL Versus a New URL
Many businesses have an existing URL address and wonder if it would be a good idea to get a more keyword laden, SEO friendly URL address instead. The answer depends on three factors:
- How many links are pointing to your current URL address
- How long your current URL address has been registered
- Does your current URL no longer reflect your business
To start with, search engines like to see website URLs that have been registered and have been around awhile. Why? To start with, most people know that most new businesses fail within the first five years and search engines want to show relevant results, not fly-by-night websites that are here today, gone tomorrow. Just like an established business that you see every day, frequency provides credibility online to the search engines, as an aging URL.
The second factor relates to the quality and quantity of links pointing to your current URL address. As discussed in the section on SEO link building, the goal is to have lots of websites pointing their links to you. Link building can take months and even years, so do you really want to throw away all of these links and start over again? It is possible to redirect links to your new address, but many will find this to be a very challenging task. So the more links that point to your existing URL address, the less sense it makes to move away from it.
Finally, there is the issue if a current URL is relevant to your current business. If over the course of time you changed the name of your business, does it still make sense to use your previous name? What happens if your law firm has a URL named after two partners who have recently left the firm? In some cases, a poor URL address is simply the result of careless initial planning. For example, if you plan to add five more partners to your law firm over the next ten years, does it make sense to buy a URL address that only names your current partners, or should you pick a SEO URL that can better reflect what you want to be? An SEO consultant can help you through this process, but make sure you select your keywords first.