The Future Of Internet Branding

I wanted to take the time to talk about internet branding and what it holds in the future. A simple Google query will show that internet branding has become a lost art in recent years. You will find that most websites these days have keywords included in their URL. Have you ever wondered why? It’s because the more keywords you stuff inside your URL the better rankings you will get when someone searches for that particular word. As a result branding has suffered big time. Let me put it like this, if you want to rank for “green t-shirts”, your best bet would be to call your company greentshirts.com whereas back in the day you would of taken the time to think of a creative name for your company and gone all out to develop the brand.

Here comes the fun bit. 2 weeks ago the head of Google’s spam team Mr Matt Cutts has come out and publicly stated that they are going to help brands out by reducing the need to stuff keywords inside your URL. That is a massive win for anyone who has taken the time to develop a brand as they will now be rewarded.

What does this mean for you? Well instead of thinking about what is best for your SEO you can now be as creative as you want and come up with a fun name for your company.

What does this mean for people that have chosen keyword stuffed URL’s? Well the good news is your not going to get punished, but instead of getting a massive advantage over your brand rivals you are now going to be competing on a more level playing ground. The intention of Google has always been to churn out the most relevant results. Just because your company is called Babboon doesn’t mean you sell monkeys, as I said before you could be selling green t-shirts.

As far as the other search engines are concerned, they are still giving ranking preferences to keyword stuffed domains, we can only hope that in the future they change this. Maybe they will see what Google is doing and decide to follow their lead. Remember good relevant quality content has never gone out of fashion, develop your brand over time, the more effort you put into it the more chance it has of paying off. If it was easy everyone would be doing it, right?