Search engine optimisation and company names
Tuesday 9 December 2008Although we haven’t gone mad on Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) at epiGenesys it’s always considered to a certain extent by ensuring that our websites are standards compliant and accessible. We also undertake other SEO activities such as linking using keywords (rather than words such as “here” and “click this”) and using metadata tags in our HTML<head>. Doing this gets us listed (somewhere) on Google for keywords relevant to our business. Hopefully this will allow people to find us if they know what we do.
But when it comes to company names, ours is a little hard to communicate. epiGenesys is not an easy name to say if you haven’t heard it spoken before (eh-pee-jen-eh-siss) and not an easy name to spell if you haven’t seen it in writing. Because of this our name is often miscommunicated, with “epiGeniuses” recently being verbalised and “epigenysys” printed in a local magazine. Type these into Google and epiGeniuses gets you a Byzantine Jurist and epigenysys gets you absolutely nothing. Even the suggestion of “epigenisis” doesn’t help.
It’s tempting to try and sneak these into our HTML somewhere but with recent cases, such as BWM’s exclusion from the Google rankings, it’s probably not worth it. Including it explicitly on our pages it would just look inconsistent and unprofessional.
So, is it something we need to worry about? As we have an odd name I think the answer is yes. The best kind of advertising is word of mouth, is it not? But is it something we can do anything about? Probably not. Without resorting to smoke and mirrors we have little legitimate reason to include these mispellings in our site. It seems that choosing an alternative name can differentiate you from others but also has its downsides. Likewise, choosing a simple name may be easy to communicate but could get lost in the search engine labyrinth.
2 Responses to “Search engine optimisation and company names”
A little thought I had last night after reading this yesterday, although having a unique name differentiates you, you need to allow for those miss-spellings. I could only find the EpiGenesys website via your own website (JA.co.uk), because I was searching Google for “epigenesIs” and “epigenesIs sheffield”, probably a common search by people hearing about you via word of mouth.
By TomG on Jan 14, 2009