Brand Matters and Naming Conventions

One of the major problems encountered by those companies struggling with SEO initiatives is not the specific tactics and techniques they are using when it comes to website design, content development, or site architecture; it is usually rooted in something deeper.

There are instances, of course, when SEO issues are rooted in some easily correctable technical error (e.g. an e-commerce system uses a random, arbitrary string of letters for page or product names which causes a range of rather significant discovery problems) but primarily, there has been a research failure when it comes to naming of brand assets – from company names to page names.

The naming of these key assets (brand-related directives made available to those responsible for SEO) could cause serious problems for search engine optimization campaigns as they are often based on poorly developed and ill-conceived strategies.

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Make no mistake - the keywords and phrases that are used by consumers for the purpose of discovering brands’ information and products, as well as enterprises and their business units, are of immense importance when it comes to search engine optimization. Hopefully, it is for obvious reasons. If not, keep reading.

One of the three main elements that the Everyday SEO strategy is concerned with is increasing the “relevance” of a website or application, and its products and business name (and across the many channels and destinations where those products are listed) provide a very tangible way to do this. Consider this - businesses that have a strong keyword in the business name rank 1.5 spots higher than if there is no keyword in the name (Source: Local SEO Guide, 2016). That alone should be motivation to rework if not the company name, then most definitely the domain name and its page names and URLs.

Optimizing the available brand, product and business names in this manner is a useful and effective undertaking in two regards. First, it serves as a direct opportunity to get in front of a digital search engine audience – that you’ve already built - looking specifically for your company, and second, when done thoughtfully, it is able to increase the awareness of your enterprise as one that provides the products or services that consumers are seeking out (although perhaps not directly). Let’s explore this concept in more detail.

Most of the queries conducted at search engines are one of three types – informational, transactional and navigational (we’ll address those in more detail later in this chapter when it comes to naming product and

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business pages). It’s the latter (navigational), when consumers are using search engines to find a specific enterprise. When appropriately-named product and business units also provide some “information” about the website, it is clear how naming conventions can support the objective of standing out with both new and existing audiences when consumers are reviewing search result pages.

Navigational searches are the instances when search engine users are actively seeking out your enterprise. Failing to optimize at all for this scenario is one of the most egregious mistakes in SEO. Say for example that a local ice cream shop named Smith & Smith is establishing a digital presence. Smith and Smith have heard about SEO and use “keywords” such as ‘ice cream shop” in the title tag of their website but to no avail. That’s smart of the Smith’s but consumers tend to use navigational searches to find information about the brands they patronize offline. Eliminating “Smith & Smith” from the title tag of a website could prove to be a costly mistake – particularly if one of the aims of having a website at all is to bring an offline audience online.

This really presents the best opportunity yet to start an initiative with long lasting positive impact - competitor research. Since there’s no time like the present, let’s look at some fundamentals of the practice of SEO and address what it is we’re actually looking for. If you haven’t already guessed, what we are after is some benchmarking data to understand not only who the competition is but how they are ranking on the search engines and for what search terms or phrases.

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The business, its brands and its products however must always be named in a way that is descriptive enough for regular and new users alike, helping them determine individual relevance to their specific needs. The search engines don’t actually take into account a business or product’s name on its own per say, but they do indeed consider its relevance in relation to the user’s query. Let’s say that I’m visiting the town where Smith & Smith have their one store and I’ve got a hankering for some cookie dough ice cream. Upon finding that upon submitting a query to the search engine, ten ice cream stores are in operation and in my area – Smith & Smith being one. The competition is pretty stiff and I’ve got several good options based on my proximity. The first indicates their store provides “Lactose-Free Ice Cream Shop,” another “Chips, Pop & Ice Cream” and then “Smith & Smith: Traditional Ice Cream Shop.” If you’re an ice-cream lover like I am, then the choice should be clear.

Naming of a product and business is as important online as it is offline. But it’s not just the front-line decisions made related to the naming of the business or its products where an opportunity exists to increase relevance. The naming of your website, the individual pages of your website, the image assets that are used, as well as every instance when that product or business is mentioned in text, are all highly influential.

For example, domain names which once played a far greater role in a successful search engine optimization campaign than they do today – are one viable option. It’s no secret these days that the search

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engines don’t treat what are known as “exact match” domain names the same as they once did. In the past it was common to see a business like Smith & Smith buy multiple domain names, covering a variety of possible keyword queries. For example, they could own IceCreamCones.com in addition to SmithandSmith.com.

+ SEO BASICS: Exact Match Domains

When you look back over the nearly two decades that search engines have been a key part of the information discovery industry, it is incredible to see how much more sophisticated they have become. A good example of this is in the role that exact match domains played in years past and the role they play today. An exact match domain is a domain name that matches the query of a user. For example, the domain for a book like this might be SEO360book.com. That domain would be an exact match for the search phrase "SEO 360 book". Pretty straightforward stuff. At one point, Google and others would rank exact match domains (or EMDs) more highly than others, assuming that since the domain included those keywords, it must be more relevant". SEO's of course picked up on this and it was increasingly common to see domains of this nature. Google reduced the weight of this signal (likely thanks to all the abuse) and not it is likely only a very light signal.

The reason this worked in the past is because search engines looked at the relevance of the domain naming to the user’s query. Anyone that entered Ice Cream Cones into a search engine would find the other Smith & Smith domain name and hopefully with some relevant content that would ultimately result in that user visiting the

Smith & Smith store. Search engines don’t take into account the actual

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domain naming into consideration – at least not as much as they used to. The result is that far fewer long tail focused domain names exist or are created anymore. They can still be very important in a creative sense when used strategically however. Remember, most searches are navigational in nature – meaning that users enter them into their preferred search engine in order to find something specific.

Say for example that Smith & Smith have an idea one day to start a loyalty program and will name it IceCream-a-Palooza; and they eventually purchase the domain IceCream-a-Palooza.com. They purchased the domain name not to run another website, however, but rather to secure the naming rights to it (there won’t be any confusion now who can use that terminology). Why take this approach?

In the past, the belief was that multiple domains would make it easier for users to find individual products or businesses. Over time however, Smith and Smith know that publishing a page on their original website for Ice Cream Palooza exclusively is a better option to increase relevance of that event to an actual brand, improving its authority along the way as the most relevant option to the users query.

Page Naming in SEO

Most search engine optimization (SEO) professionals spend a lot of their time optimizing the titles and descriptions of their Web pages to rank higher and attract more visitors, but many also forget to optimize another important aspect of a Web page that can affect its ranking: the URL.

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As with title tags, URLs help describe a website and page to search engines and potential visitors, meaning that they should be updated (or at least checked) regularly to ensure they are relevant, accurate and enticing for users.

There are various “best practices” for URL structure that have popped up over the years, such as keeping them as short as possible, while remaining descriptive, and that they should indicate the different levels of a site’s structure by including folders and/or subfolders.

+ SEO MASTER: Image Filenames

Every document on the Web. be it an image or a blog post. needs to have a name (a filename) - how else could it be accessed otherwise! Filenames are important for a variety of reasons. Clear, concise and meaningful names should be used for images, for example, because it will be easy to identify what these images are when they are on a server (cat.jpg vs 52334234asdf.jpg) and within the source code of a page. Search engines do take into consideration file names into their ranking algorithms as a signal of relevant, although that signal is very light, and as a result SEO professionals quickly went to work optimizing those assets to help the pages on which they appeared rank higher for specific queries.

But those general tactics don’t always reflect the trends of the day, which is why we’re going to look at some modern page-naming conventions for three different query types (i.e. informational, navigational and transactional) utilized by SEO pros on the search

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results pages today. To do this, we’ll look at some of the top results for different searches and for each type of query.

Search Query Types

If an enterprise is going to optimize its website (or application) to increase the opportunities it is afforded for discovery by consumers, it is going to need to understand the variations in the types of keywords used by buyers and browsers of the ‘Net.

Let’s take a closer look at the three main types of keywords and learn about how they are used when it comes to page naming specifically. What readers will discover is that while including keywords and key phrases are not the most influential element, they still carry some weight in the virtual eyes of the search engines. That, coupled with users proclivity to select listings that match their intent, and it is a perfect opportunity - one quite easy to manage - to start optimizing your digital presence.

Informational

When it comes to informational page URLs, it is important to utilize keywords as much as possible, and to be aware of more long-tail search queries that may come up so you can include them in your URLs, as well.

Search term: top baby names - Two of the domains names in the URL for this query actually used keywords from the search, and one of them utilized the full query in the domain name (without hyphens). In

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addition, four (or 50 percent) of the URLs used the full keyword string, in order, somewhere in the address. Six of the results (75 percent) used hyphen to separate terms in the URL, while one of them (12.5 percent) did not separate the word at all. Five of the pages (62.5 percent) were located in folders on the site, according to the URLs, while three of them (37.5 percent) were organized by date. One of the URLs ended with a .html extension. The longest URL was 77 characters, while the shortest was just 21; the average character length was 49.

Search term: types of sushi - All eight of the URLs for this query used at least one of the search keywords; half of them used all three words, three of which (75 percent) used them all in order. Of the page names, 75 percent had the individual words separated by hyphens, while one did not separate them at all; one of the domain names even had a hyphen in it. Two, or 25 percent, of the pages were not located in any specific folders; one of the page was in a golder, while four of the URLs actually referenced pages that were located beneath multiple subfolders. Two URLs ended in an .asp extension, one in an .aspx and two others in .html extensions. The longest was 75 characters long; the shortest was 27 characters; the average was 50.9 characters.

Search term: best hip hop albums 2012 - Every one of the URLs for this search used hyphens to separate different words in the page title at the end of the address. Four of these pages were located in folders on the website, as indicated by the URL, while two of those were actually in subfolders. However, two of them were actually organized by date, so

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where the folders were normally located in the other URLs, these pages instead had a year or specific date (e.g. /2012/08/31/). Moreover, one URL used a content ID number as a search parameter in the URL, while another one introduced the page title at the end of the address by prefacing it with “title.” before adding the name of the page. The longest URL was 91 characters long, and the shortest was 44 characters. The average for all of them was 67.5 characters.

Navigational

Navigational searches are those that are looking for something specific, so a smart brand knows that it should include its name in all of its URLs whenever possible. In addition, you should your industry’s most prominent keyword frequently. Plus, it helps to keep these address names as short and easy-to-remember as possible.

Search term: PetSmart - Five of the seven (71 percent) used this keyword somewhere in the URL, and three of them (43 percent) used it in the domain name. However, two (28.5 percent) don’t use the keyword at all. One of these pages (14 percent) is located on a subdomain, as well, while one is in a folder, and another is in a subfolder. The longest URL was 61 characters long, and the shortest was just 17. The average for all seven was 36.1 characters.

Search term: Emergency 24 - Four (57 percent) of these URLs included the keywords somewhere, and three of them had it in sequence. Just one of them used it in the domain name. One page was hosted on a subdomain, and 43 percent of the pages were located in folders on the

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site, with one of them buried in a subfolder. In the page names, two URLs separated individual words with hyphens, but one did nothing to separate them. One page ended its address with an .html extension and another with an .asp extension. The longest URL was 65 characters, and the shortest, like PetSmart, was only 17, but the average character-length for all seven URLs was 35.

Search term: Verizon Wireless -A whopping six out of seven (or 86 percent) of these URLS used both keywords, while four of them had that exact string, including the one that used it in the domain name. Two of the pages are hosted on subdomains, while interestingly, two of them start with a “www22.” subdomain. Five of the pages (71 percent) are located in folders, with one of those being in a subfolder. In the page names, one separates different words by using both hyphens and a “+” sign, while another one actually uses underscores to distinguish different terms.

Transactional

Most of us use the Web to shop, at least on occasion, and so many of our daily searches have to do with potential transactions we’re thinking of making. For SEO professionals, this means it is important to include possible keywords in a page’s URL structure, but that it is more important to organize and name a website’s folders and subfolders so that they are not too long and add a lot of unnecessary clutter to URLs, because, as you’ll see, many of these URLs are already quite long anyway. More than likely you’re going to have a lot of

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products that could be searched for, and you need to be able to find them easily on your server without using cumbersome folder names.

Search term: basketball hoop prices - Two sets of two pages for this keyword actually came from the same domain name (walmart.com and amazon.com, respectively). Seven of the eight pages use at least one of these keywords in the URL, including one that used “basketball” in the domain name, while two of the addresses used “basketball hoop” together. Two URLs used content IDs to indicate specific products, while one of them used a catalog ID. Six of the pages were located on subfolders. Five of them (62.5 percent) separated individual words in the page title by using hyphens. The longest URL was 107 characters long, while the shortest was 24; the average of all eight was 60.8 characters.

Search term: black office chair wheels - Two (25 percent) of these URLS did not include any of the keywords, but two had one keyword, another two had three keywords and the other two had all four keywords, including one that had them all in sequence. Seven of these pages (87.5 percent) were located in folders, and 75 percent of them were in some kind of subfolder. Six of the addresses used hyphens to separate individual words in the page titles, while four of them used product IDs to identify the unique products on each page. One URL ended with an .html extension, and another ended with a .php extension. The longest URL was a massive 123 characters, and the shortest was 39. The average length of all eight URLs was 70.3 characters.

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Search term: used bookstore Chicago - All eight of these URLs used at least one of the keywords from the query, and seven of those actually used all three words; three (37.5 percent) even used all of the words in sequence, and two (25 percent) used some of the keywords in the site’s domain name. Four of the pages are located in folders (one of them in a subfolder), but one of the pages is organized by date, much like with the informational queries. Four of the page names separate individual words with hyphens (although one also uses an underscore mark), but one of them uses “+” signs. One page, which is actually a site’s search results page, uses the command “search?” before including the keywords being searched for on that page. One of the pages ends with a .html extension, and other actually ends with a .story extension. The longest URL is 105 characters long, but the shortest is just 23. The average URL length for this query is 66.4 characters.

Why is any of this important? Simple. In order to design your own effective strategy, it proves useful to see how others are managing to secure top placement for key terms and phrases. The takeaway? Conduct your own research to identify competitors’ tactics in order to influence your own success.

The Keyword Research Basics

There are seemingly endless supplies of guides that address how brands can go about finding keywords. The thing is - they will pretty much all tell you the exact same thing: find those terms and phrases that consumers use to discover and find products and services (virtual

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or physical) that match or are related to your own. And once you do that, you have literally set the course to SEO success.

Finding the "right" keywords, of course, can be challenging. Ultimately, what marketers and webmasters (and SEO's) should look for are keywords with a high or medium level of search volume, are somewhat competitive, and are those that are either brand specific or transactional in nature. This is not to say that information based keywords aren't important - they most certainly are - but if time and resources are at a premium (like they are at every enterprise) then concentrating on these type of keywords is simply smart businesses.

Let's take a look at how to find productive keywords without any of the expensive tools. Keep in mind that paid/commercial tools do exist and some are incredibly powerful and are certainly worth the investment. It is still possible however to discover a few terms on your own that are capable of driving significant amounts of traffic without any major expense - and perhaps the best way to do that comes from Google and its Keyword Planner offering.

While designed primarily for advertising research, the Google Keyword Planner is as good a place as any to start a search for keywords. Not only does Google show you related terms and phrases based on the term or phrase entered, but they also display the average monthly searches and the amount of competition. Again, this is advertising related data but if you're looking for a quick start, from the largest search engine known to the world (capturing some 78 percent of search traffic) there are certainly other places to look. There are

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commercial and enterprise-grade offerings and in almost every way they are more powerful, accurate and useful than what Google provides. Solutions like UberSuggest and SEMrush go into incredible detail on not just the volume of keywords but also the variations of those keywords, and how much traffic is likely being delivered as a result of competitor’s location on the search result pages.

There are SEO professionals out there who will suggest rating and ranking keywords based purely on their potential to acquire traffic. I would not suggest that this is an unproductive approach to take, but remember that what we are ultimately after is content and connections. If you happen to discover a keyword with high volume but little relevance to the brand or its products and services, it doesn't much matter if it is not contributing to a business’s success through new business and conversion.

Consider looking not only at your own pages through the Google Keyword Planner, UberSuggest and SEMrush, however, but also those of your competitors. You might just find a "gem" of a term or phrase that could be targeted to capture organic traffic. Ultimately, of course, the keywords you discover may not be ideal for brand or product names, but they will most certainly be important as SEO's begin developing and engineering their content. As a result, a great deal of attention is paid to how keywords and phrases are used on page - none more hotly debated than that of keyword density.

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A Quick Note on Keyword Density

Another somewhat related topic that seems to continually be top of mind with search engine optimization professionals is that of keyword density. While many suggest that it doesn't play nearly the role in terms of influence that it once did, others disagree and consider it just as important as ever.

In the past it was common for those responsible for search engine optimization initiatives to research the keyword density of the top sites, determine the average density for a specific term, and use that average as a guide when creating content that would be used in the optimization of a specific page.

Just Call It What It Is - A Vital Factor to Success

One of the most important lessons I have ever learned about search engine optimization and more broadly about business in general is to name things (brands, products, and services) exactly what they are. Often we’re prone to being overly creative, relying more on our wit than our wisdom. Not to say that this doesn’t have the place, but search engines - despite their increasing sophistication - still have difficulty figuring out implied meaning. Thanks to machine learning and artificial intelligence, these systems will become much improved with time, but in the interim, there are benefits to concentrating on the clarity and relevance of brand names, domains, page URLs and the keywords that are used to promote our virtual and physical products.

"For those in pursuit of higher rankings, aiding the consumer discovery process by optimizing the coding, accessibility and infrastructure on a website is one of the best long term courses of action."