There are a lot of things that go into google ranking a website. One of the most important factors, however, is a pages url. A few years ago, I made a site for a small magazine called Closing Remarks. It’s URL “Closing-Remarks.com” ended up getting the site indexed really high on Yahoo for the keyword “Closing Remarks”, which is a term that is searched surprisingly often. Needless to say, the magazine is a Christian literary journal, and optimizing for that keyword is about as useless as it can be. In fact, among those who searched for the term, there is an 80% bounce rate. Chances are, that the 20% who didn’t bounce were actually looking for the Magazine “Closing Remarks”. Others were looking for something else.
I tell you that story just to demonstrate how important picking a URL can be, both from a search engine marketing standpoint, as well as from a branding standpoint. For further discussion regarding how to select a good URL for your new domain, Aaron Wall’s recent article Brand Considerations When Choosing Domain Names is really good.
