Domain Names Still Important Despite Search Engine Popularity

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Loren Baker

08/24/04

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Domain Names Still Important Despite Search Engine Popularity

A common belief is that search engines like Google make specific web addresses, that is, Internet domain names, relatively unimportant. “That is not true,” asserts psychologist Susan D. Griffith, Ph.D. “As in other areas of branding, names are everything, and memorable names on the Internet are more important than ever before.”

“A wonderful feature of the Internet is that web addresses are accesible by letters and words. There is no need for an Internet directory, that is, a search engine, when we can remember the name of the place we want to visit on the Internet,” Griffith remarks.

All businesses need targeted, memorable web addresses this century, but most businesses don’t have them, maintains a psychologist who studies effective use of the Internet. “All businesses today are online businesses, whether sales take place via the Internet or not. All businesses today need web addresses just as much as they need telephone numbers, and good, memorable web addresses are more important than ever.”

“Google seems so fast that many of us do not remember to keep or search our web browser ‘favorites’ or ‘history’. The search engine itself becomes our friend, our department store, our brand, rather than brand being the individual product or service and its web address.”

That’s okay with Google, who needs you to forget where you went before so you will have to come back to Google and search again. After all, as America is well aware of late, Google makes a lot of money including paid listings on its search results pages.

Griffith believes one reason search engines have become so important in Internet sales is that many businesses are overlooking the power of the memorable web address both in branding and in attracting web page visitors–and in bringing them back.

“Ebay, Google and Amazon–they are great–as names for services that work for us and as names that we remember. They are web addresses and brand names in one. We remember them. We do not have to use a search engine to find Google. When we do use a search engine to search for search engines, we find competitive search engines that also interest us and may distract us. But we don’t use a search engine to find Google, because we remember its name, its domain name and web address. And Google retains us as a regular customer, not distracted by the other search engines found in a Google search.”