For those domains that aren’t taken with legitimate business and personal use, the original dotcom era managed to convince pretty much everyone that, if you got yourself an attractive domain name, you’d be able to sell it for vast profit down the line. This pretty much meant the end of availability.

The advent of ‘Web 2.0’, where random services with even more random names are ten a penny, has brought about a new hysteria – one where seemingly nonsensical words are also being registered as domain names. I know this, because I was looking for one. You can try this yourself – make a word up in your head that is reasonably short and spelt as you would say it, and chances are, it will already have its .com version registered.

PROBLEM
Until recently, this hasn’t really been a problem – there’s nothing really wrong with longer domain names, especially when you’re looking to punt a particular service or interaction, however we’re increasingly getting to a point where even these types of domain names are ceasing to be available. Whilst there’s many variants of ‘used cars in Manchester’, there’s only really one worth having – usedcarsinmanchester.co.uk. You can hyphenate that all you want, but it’s not going to cut the mustard like it’s non-spaced daddy.

This has been something that has interested and, on occasion, frustrated me – having worked on community projects and the like, it’s nice to have a simple, to the point domain name to sit the website on, and to see it taken, usually by a domain reseller holding page or link spammer website, can get a little annoying.

In short, if you can get a good domain name nowadays, you’ve done well – especially if you’re operating in a competitive market.

It seems that I’m not alone in that conclusion. Over the last few months, the British Army has been running a series of adverts on TV that encourage viewers to find out more information on their website, yet instead of pushing the URL of the website, they direct you to do an internet search for the term ‘start thinking soldier’. When you do this, on any of the top search engines, you are presented (both as a sponsored link, and top within the natural search results) with the relevant army website.

I’ve also noticed this on local radio – one or two companies have given up telling you the domain name of their website, instead directing you to type a particular phrase (usually the company and town name) into Google. This may seem an obvious thing to do when looking for a company anyway, but it’s a new thing to use that as the primary call to action for directing traffic to your website.

And so to the point of this article – is SEO the new domain name? Are we at a point where, given there is an acceptance that the availability of desirable domain names is a thing of the past, we’re facing a new world where websites will battle it out for key phrase supremacy?

Of course, this type of thing has been happening pretty much since the invention of the search engine. However, we’re not talking about optimisation in the current sense. Let me explain...

Many moons ago, when the web was still young and Google had only just indexed its billionth page, the optimisation of a page was pretty much limited to littering as many instances of the keyword or phrase you were looking to get results for as you could possibly get away with. Add a plethora of links at the bottom of the page, and you were seen as an authority on your subject.

As time has gone by, things have become more complex, and the search engines more intelligent, and your webpages now have to be relevant. There’s also a lot more people offering the same thing you are and, as such, it’s big business to be able to top the results for a given keyword (and often, the only way to ensure traffic is to pay for it in the form of sponsored links). Modern SEO is a well matured and complex beast.

NEW ANIMAL
However, SEO as a domain name is an entirely new animal – you don’t have to optimise a phrase to include your product name, or indeed any keyword, just as your domain name can be anything you want. Indeed, the more obscure the phrase, the better...

The parameters for an optimised phrase are that it’s short and easy to remember, the rest is somewhat irrelevant (although it’s always nice to stay on topic). If you can optimise your site for a phrase that isn’t so popular, it stands to reason that not only will it be easier to achieve good rankings in the first place, but also that you can do so naturally, rather than via sponsored keyword purchase.

The good thing about this idea is that it’s a relatively unsaturated market – effectively, the allocation has been reset to zero on the availability of your phrase domain name. You also have the advantage of such things as the inbuilt search engine spell-checkers.

I for one wouldn’t be surprised if we see an increasing number of companies taking up the idea of encouraging potential visitors to search for their website via a phrase, rather than expect them to remember (and spell correctly) a domain name that could be several words long.

There are, of course, some obvious flaws with this idea. As you’re effectively dealing with optimisation, rather than a dedicated and exclusive domain name, you’re very much at the mercy of others doing a better job than you of giving your chosen phrase dominance on their website. As time goes on, the effectiveness of this idea would become less and less effective. But then, isn’t this basically the same situation we’re in with domain names now?